An article in the Seattle Times last week tells the story of Chaser, the dog who has a vocabulary of over a thousand words.
Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychology teacher at Wofford College. Pilley had read an article in Science about Rico, a dog who had been taught to recognize the names of two hundred different objects, and he set out to better that. Working with Chaser four or five hours a day, Pilley showed Chaser objects, stating their names, then hiding them, then doing it again, up to forty times, with treats and other reinforcements for identifying things correctly. He tried to add two new words a day, and also spent time reviewing ones learned earlier.
According to Pilley, Chaser "loves her drills." She demands the four or five hours of work, gets fretful if she doesn't get it, and sometimes, Pilley says, he "has to go to bed to get away from her."
At this point, it will come as no surprise to you dog owners that Chaser is a border collie.
Border collies are not, in my opinion, dogs. They are doglike entities created by aliens from the planet Neurotica-6, which were then put on earth to infiltrate the ranks of real dogs and learn to emulate their ways. This effort has been only partially successful. I say this because I own a border collie, Doolin, who is the single oddest animal I've ever owned, and she's had some stiff competition in that regard. Doolin learned how to unlatch our fence gates by watching us do it. She has no concept of the word "play;" when she chases a frisbee and brings it back, you can tell that what she's thinking is, "Didn't I do a good job retrieving this frisbee? I did notice, however, that I was 5.8 milliseconds shy of my previous record time. Next time, I will beat my old record! You'll see!" Thus the joke:
Q: How many border collies does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one! And then he will rewire the electrical system to bring it up to code!
Contrast this to my other dog, Grendel, who is a mutt to the extent that he looks like the result of someone putting random body parts from about seven different dog breeds together with superglue. All Grendel thinks about is playing, food, and sleeping. To say that he and Doolin don't understand each other is a vast understatement. Mostly when they interact, they seem to regard each other with mild puzzlement. Grendel seems to be thinking, "It looks like a dog, and smells like a dog. But it never wants to play. Oh, well, I do! Where's my rope toy?" Doolin, on the other hand, thinks, "Dear lord, that's a funny-looking sheep. No matter, I can still herd it. There's a job to be done here, and I'm the one to do it!"
In any case, back to Chaser. After teaching Chaser over a thousand nouns, Pilley went on to teaching her some verbs -- touch, paw, fetch, nose, and so on. And even more amazingly, Chaser understands categories; each of her frisbees (for example) has its own name, and she knows them all, but given the command "fetch a frisbee" she will pick out one of them. Now, Pilley is working on trying to teach Chaser syntax -- the idea that changing the order of the words can change the meaning of the command; that "touch the red frisbee, then fetch the green ball" means something different than "fetch the green frisbee, then touch the red ball."
I find this absolutely fascinating. I wonder if what is going on in Chaser's brain is the same as what happens when children learn words -- i.e. if there are analogous language-learning center in dogs' brains and in humans'. I wonder, too, what the limit of her understanding is -- if she could be taught to understand consequentials, for example -- "if I touch the red toy, you touch the blue one; if I touch the blue toy, you touch the green one." (I know some students who still haven't mastered simple consequentials such as, "If you don't turn in your homework, you will get a bad grade.") Lastly, I wonder if this is a skill unique to border collies, or if other dog breeds, or other animal species, might have the same skill. I doubt seriously whether Grendel's vocabulary, for example, could ever be extended past "rope toy," "dinner time," and "youwannagoforawalk?" And our cats are hopeless -- not that I don't think they have adequate brainpower, but because any time I try to train them to do something, they respond with scorn. "Stay off the dinner table?" they seem to say, their expressions dripping sarcasm. "Maybe for the moment. But you have to stop watching me at some point, you know."
But keep your eye on Chaser. She's going places. I'm sure she'll be making the rounds of the talk shows, and after that, the next logical step is the political arena. Wouldn't you like to see Sarah Palin and Chaser debate the merits of Universal Veterinary Health Care? I know I would.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Six degrees of cousinhood
Allegedly we're connected to anyone in the world through six degrees of separation. That contention usually uses the criteria of "knowing someone" as the connector. What, however, about being actually blood-related to the people we bump into?
I've had three instances of finding I'm related to someone that, by all odds, I shouldn't have any particular connection to. The most recent, and to my mind most amazing, example of this I discovered only recently. I was on the way to a gig in Rochester with my band Crooked Sixpence, and Kathy, the fiddler, was carpooling with me and our friend Pamela who calls many of the dances we play for.
We were just chatting idly when the subject of family came up. Kathy, who was born and raised in southeastern England, was telling us that while she seems thoroughly British, actually one side of her family were French Jews who came over to England from Alsace in the late 1800s.
"That's interesting," I said. "My family is mostly Cajun French, and they were Catholics who came over to Nova Scotia from France in the 17th century; but one branch of my family were part of a small Jewish group in Donaldsonville, Louisiana -- and my forebears on that side of the family came over from Alsace in the 1800s, too. What was your Jewish ancestor's last name?"
"It's a pretty odd name," Kathy said. "Godchaux."
Well, my jaw dropped; my great uncle, Lehmann Meyer, married a Godchaux. This spurred Pamela to announce at the dance that Kathy and I were cousins, which got a good laugh because we look nothing alike, and there it rested.
Well, a couple of days ago, I decided to do a little digging, and found that someone had posted online records of a Godchaux family that had gone from Alsace to England. I sent the link to Kathy, and she responded, "Je suis GOBSMACKED! C'est ma famille!" In fact, the records included the names of her grandmother and grandfather! Intrigued, I started to examine the information on the link I'd sent more carefully.
Kathy's family, and mine, not only emigrated from the same area of France at the same time, the names of her ancestors and the folks they married share not one, or two, but eight family names. On the Meyer branch of my family there are (by blood and by marriage) the names Bloch, Godchaux, Levy, Solomon, Kahn, Weill, and Dreyfus. Amongst Kathy's Godchauxs are... Meyer, Bloch, Levy, Solomon, Kahn, Weill, and Dreyfus.
I still haven't found our common ancestor, but if we're not cousins, I'll be astonished.
What's the likelihood? A French guy from Louisiana and an Englishwoman from near London, and we're probably cousins within six generations or so. And, as I said, this isn't the first time this has happened to me; a former student, who was born and bred here in upstate New York, turned out to be a third cousin, once removed; and a woman who sat near us at Cornell hockey games for years, a third cousin. In each case, we discovered the link through casual conversation that turned up the connection.
I know we're all related -- it's become almost a cliché. But what has left me, like Kathy, gobsmacked is that we may be more closely related to some of our friends and casual acquaintances than we would have dreamed. I wonder, if it were possible... if we're connected to everyone in the world by six degrees of separation, what is the average degree of cousinhood we share with those around us? Unfortunately, it's probably not possible to figure that out, given the paucity of genealogical records prior to 1800, but as my experiences show, it may well be a smaller number than any of us would have guessed.
I've had three instances of finding I'm related to someone that, by all odds, I shouldn't have any particular connection to. The most recent, and to my mind most amazing, example of this I discovered only recently. I was on the way to a gig in Rochester with my band Crooked Sixpence, and Kathy, the fiddler, was carpooling with me and our friend Pamela who calls many of the dances we play for.
We were just chatting idly when the subject of family came up. Kathy, who was born and raised in southeastern England, was telling us that while she seems thoroughly British, actually one side of her family were French Jews who came over to England from Alsace in the late 1800s.
"That's interesting," I said. "My family is mostly Cajun French, and they were Catholics who came over to Nova Scotia from France in the 17th century; but one branch of my family were part of a small Jewish group in Donaldsonville, Louisiana -- and my forebears on that side of the family came over from Alsace in the 1800s, too. What was your Jewish ancestor's last name?"
"It's a pretty odd name," Kathy said. "Godchaux."
Well, my jaw dropped; my great uncle, Lehmann Meyer, married a Godchaux. This spurred Pamela to announce at the dance that Kathy and I were cousins, which got a good laugh because we look nothing alike, and there it rested.
Well, a couple of days ago, I decided to do a little digging, and found that someone had posted online records of a Godchaux family that had gone from Alsace to England. I sent the link to Kathy, and she responded, "Je suis GOBSMACKED! C'est ma famille!" In fact, the records included the names of her grandmother and grandfather! Intrigued, I started to examine the information on the link I'd sent more carefully.
Kathy's family, and mine, not only emigrated from the same area of France at the same time, the names of her ancestors and the folks they married share not one, or two, but eight family names. On the Meyer branch of my family there are (by blood and by marriage) the names Bloch, Godchaux, Levy, Solomon, Kahn, Weill, and Dreyfus. Amongst Kathy's Godchauxs are... Meyer, Bloch, Levy, Solomon, Kahn, Weill, and Dreyfus.
I still haven't found our common ancestor, but if we're not cousins, I'll be astonished.
What's the likelihood? A French guy from Louisiana and an Englishwoman from near London, and we're probably cousins within six generations or so. And, as I said, this isn't the first time this has happened to me; a former student, who was born and bred here in upstate New York, turned out to be a third cousin, once removed; and a woman who sat near us at Cornell hockey games for years, a third cousin. In each case, we discovered the link through casual conversation that turned up the connection.
I know we're all related -- it's become almost a cliché. But what has left me, like Kathy, gobsmacked is that we may be more closely related to some of our friends and casual acquaintances than we would have dreamed. I wonder, if it were possible... if we're connected to everyone in the world by six degrees of separation, what is the average degree of cousinhood we share with those around us? Unfortunately, it's probably not possible to figure that out, given the paucity of genealogical records prior to 1800, but as my experiences show, it may well be a smaller number than any of us would have guessed.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Send in the clones
A group of scientists at Kyoto University are currently working on resurrecting the woolly mammoth.
The method is simple in principle; they will use tissue from a frozen mammoth carcass found in Siberia. Nuclei will be removed from cells in the tissue, and those nuclei will be inserted into the egg cells of an elephant which have had their own nuclei removed. The engineered egg cells will be inserted into the uterus of a female elephant, and if all goes well, the elephant will give birth to a baby mammoth.
Of course, in practice, it's quite a bit more difficult than that. Differentiated tissue (i.e. just about all the tissues in an adult organism) has undergone genetic changes that have to be undone, returning the cells to totipotence -- the state of then being able to re-differentiate into all the kinds of tissue the animal produces. Put simply, if this isn't done, skin cells can only produce more skin cells, muscle cells more muscle cells, and so on. The trick is to return the cell to the capacity it had very early in development.
It's been done before, not that it's easy; consider Dolly the Sheep, the first animal born that was the result of adult-tissue cloning. Some animals have proven very difficult to clone -- to my knowledge, monkeys have never been cloned from adult tissue, although my source for that particular piece of information is two years old, and in this field things change nearly on a daily basis. And the idea of using cloning to produce animals that are endangered (or extinct) has already been done; a gaur, an endangered species of water buffalo, was produced that way in 2001, but the baby only lived two days.
And this brings us to the risks.
First, there's the risk of it being a big waste of money, and I hope my readers know me well enough by now that I'm not saying this from any sort of anti-science stance. The gaur that only lived two days died of dysentery, but some scientists believe that it was felled by the cloning process itself. Recall that Dolly the Sheep lived only half the lifespan of a normal sheep. Cells seem to retain a "memory" of the age of the animal they were taken from, and so if someone cloned me (heaven forfend), the baby thus produced would be normal in all respects except for two -- first, it would look like me, which is unfortunate but not fatal; and second, its cells would very likely retain the genetic memory of having been taken from a fifty-year-old, and therefore the cloned Gordon would probably die of old age by age thirty or so. So one has to wonder if a mammoth born from this process would live long enough to make it worth it.
Second, of course, there are the vaguer fears of resurrecting extinct animals, which of course have only been made worse by Jurassic Park. Many folks seem to be reacting to the mammoth-cloning project by saying, "Don't you people ever watch science fiction movies? Inevitably, the scientists plunge right on ahead with their experiments, ignoring the people who are worried about the risks, and then next thing you know there are herds of giant, malevolent mammoths destroying Tokyo."
Well, maybe. I think the former problem -- that it will be unsuccessful, and therefore something of a waste of time, effort, and money -- is far more likely. Nevertheless, I think it should proceed. There's just the coolness factor of getting to see, finally, what an animal looks like that went extinct long ago. Myself, I'd love to see them bring back a few others -- how about the dodo? Or the moa? (For those of you who don't know what a moa is, picture a badass ostrich on steroids, and you have the idea.) The Tasmanian wolf would also be near the top of my list, as would the saber-toothed tiger, although I suspect that last one went extinct long enough ago that it might be impossible to find intact cell nuclei. All animals with high awesomeness factor, however.
I recognize the fact that even if the cloning project is successful, it is a long way from producing a single individual that way to producing a large enough number of them to generate a self-sustaining population, that is capable of reproducing faster than their death rate -- what ecologists call the "minimum viable population." The question comes up, of course, of where we would put a herd of mammoths once we got one -- heaven knows I don't want them around here, we have enough trouble with deer eating our gardens. But that's a question to be resolved later.
In any case, we'll keep our eye on the team at Kyoto University, which is predicting success within five years. Whatever happens, they are sure to learn a great deal about the cloning process from this study. All Jurassic Park-style fears aside, it's a pretty amazing thing to attempt, and I wish them success in this mammoth undertaking.
The method is simple in principle; they will use tissue from a frozen mammoth carcass found in Siberia. Nuclei will be removed from cells in the tissue, and those nuclei will be inserted into the egg cells of an elephant which have had their own nuclei removed. The engineered egg cells will be inserted into the uterus of a female elephant, and if all goes well, the elephant will give birth to a baby mammoth.
Of course, in practice, it's quite a bit more difficult than that. Differentiated tissue (i.e. just about all the tissues in an adult organism) has undergone genetic changes that have to be undone, returning the cells to totipotence -- the state of then being able to re-differentiate into all the kinds of tissue the animal produces. Put simply, if this isn't done, skin cells can only produce more skin cells, muscle cells more muscle cells, and so on. The trick is to return the cell to the capacity it had very early in development.
It's been done before, not that it's easy; consider Dolly the Sheep, the first animal born that was the result of adult-tissue cloning. Some animals have proven very difficult to clone -- to my knowledge, monkeys have never been cloned from adult tissue, although my source for that particular piece of information is two years old, and in this field things change nearly on a daily basis. And the idea of using cloning to produce animals that are endangered (or extinct) has already been done; a gaur, an endangered species of water buffalo, was produced that way in 2001, but the baby only lived two days.
And this brings us to the risks.
First, there's the risk of it being a big waste of money, and I hope my readers know me well enough by now that I'm not saying this from any sort of anti-science stance. The gaur that only lived two days died of dysentery, but some scientists believe that it was felled by the cloning process itself. Recall that Dolly the Sheep lived only half the lifespan of a normal sheep. Cells seem to retain a "memory" of the age of the animal they were taken from, and so if someone cloned me (heaven forfend), the baby thus produced would be normal in all respects except for two -- first, it would look like me, which is unfortunate but not fatal; and second, its cells would very likely retain the genetic memory of having been taken from a fifty-year-old, and therefore the cloned Gordon would probably die of old age by age thirty or so. So one has to wonder if a mammoth born from this process would live long enough to make it worth it.
Second, of course, there are the vaguer fears of resurrecting extinct animals, which of course have only been made worse by Jurassic Park. Many folks seem to be reacting to the mammoth-cloning project by saying, "Don't you people ever watch science fiction movies? Inevitably, the scientists plunge right on ahead with their experiments, ignoring the people who are worried about the risks, and then next thing you know there are herds of giant, malevolent mammoths destroying Tokyo."
Well, maybe. I think the former problem -- that it will be unsuccessful, and therefore something of a waste of time, effort, and money -- is far more likely. Nevertheless, I think it should proceed. There's just the coolness factor of getting to see, finally, what an animal looks like that went extinct long ago. Myself, I'd love to see them bring back a few others -- how about the dodo? Or the moa? (For those of you who don't know what a moa is, picture a badass ostrich on steroids, and you have the idea.) The Tasmanian wolf would also be near the top of my list, as would the saber-toothed tiger, although I suspect that last one went extinct long enough ago that it might be impossible to find intact cell nuclei. All animals with high awesomeness factor, however.
I recognize the fact that even if the cloning project is successful, it is a long way from producing a single individual that way to producing a large enough number of them to generate a self-sustaining population, that is capable of reproducing faster than their death rate -- what ecologists call the "minimum viable population." The question comes up, of course, of where we would put a herd of mammoths once we got one -- heaven knows I don't want them around here, we have enough trouble with deer eating our gardens. But that's a question to be resolved later.
In any case, we'll keep our eye on the team at Kyoto University, which is predicting success within five years. Whatever happens, they are sure to learn a great deal about the cloning process from this study. All Jurassic Park-style fears aside, it's a pretty amazing thing to attempt, and I wish them success in this mammoth undertaking.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Swamp thing redux
A friend of mine, knowing both my Louisiana origins and my passion for all things cryptozoological, sent me the following clip of a news broadcast alleging that some hunters caught a photograph of a zombie-like creature that had trashed their hunting camp in Berwick, Louisiana. A security camera at the camp caught the image right before the camera was destroyed. (See it here.)
Well, first I must comment upon the totally, like, you know, amazing articulateness of the, like, newscasters, both of whom like made me totally wonder how anyone would, like, you know, hire them to do the news. Secondly, the word "Photoshop" screamed itself across my brain as soon as I saw the photograph.
Among the many problems with this photo, the most important one was that the creature's eyes were glowing. This only happens when you take a photograph with a flash at night -- the glow is the reflection of the flash from the tapetum lucidum, a reflective membrane at the back of the retina of certain animals. Security cameras, not having flashes, wouldn't create this effect. So unless you believe that a zombie's eyes glow from the Fire of Their Inner Evil, this one seems to be a non-starter.
Watching this clip of course started me on a veritable orgy of monster-watching, and even if predictably I thought none of them convincing, I found a few that were worthy of honorable mention. My favorite one, in the chills department, is this one, which supposedly captures images of a "shadow creature" taken by some hikers who were using a videocamera. The videocamera was later found, Blair-Witch-style, and "no one has ever come to claim it." It's definitely creepy -- not to be watched at night. However, once again to point out only the main problem with it, it is supposed to come from "Emerson County" in which mysterious disappearances had occurred in 1957, and this camera was found only two miles from where those disappearances had taken place. Unfortunately for the creators of this video, there is no Emerson County in any state in the United States -- surprising, I know, but I just checked the official Index of Counties, and it goes from Emanuel County, Georgia to Emery County, Utah with nary an Emerson to be found. So, First Rule of Creepy Video Creation is: If you expect your viewers to believe that your video is real, don't state that it was taken in a place that does not, in fact, exist.
Here's another, with a bit of a frame from "The Paranormal Report." Besides the obvious problem with Clayton Morris' statement that the reporter who sent it in had no reason to fake it because he didn't want his name mentioned, there's another, and subtler problem with it, that makes me certain it's faked. Watch it and see if you can figure it out.
Ready for the answer?
The creature's shadow is pointing the wrong direction. Look at the shadow on the man's face; it's clear that the sun is coming from the right side of the frame (from the viewer's perspective), i.e. from behind the cameraman's right shoulder. The creature's shadow should therefore be pointing up and to the left (again, from the viewer's perspective). It points up and to the right. Unless "interdimensional creatures" block sunlight in a different fashion than we ordinary, plain-old-dimensional creatures, it's a fake.
This next one has all of the classic elements; hikers in a remote area, videotaping just for the hell of it, and accidentally capturing a clip of a bigfoot. "Did you see that... in the clearing!" is also required dialogue to insert somewhere in there. Even the site is well-chosen; Mt. St. Helens is supposedly the epicenter of Pacific Northwest bigfoot sightings. (There's a lava tube on the side of the mountain called "Ape Cave," which some claim is because of the prevalence of sasquatches in the area -- but the real explanation is more prosaic. It was named after a hiking group called the "St. Helens Apes" in the 1950s.) I don't have any particular reason to claim that this one's a hoax, except that I tend to instinctively doubt clips like this because of the obvious likelihood of fakery; but to my eyes, it does look a little more like a guy in a monkey suit than it does like my personal conception of bigfoot.
Lastly, I have to give some credit to the makers of this video. Myself, I didn't know that bigfoot wears Nike tennis shoes, but I guess even cryptozooids have to cave in to fashion trends in athletic wear. And the tag line "The people in the car and the cameraman were never heard from again" is pure brilliance.
Well, first I must comment upon the totally, like, you know, amazing articulateness of the, like, newscasters, both of whom like made me totally wonder how anyone would, like, you know, hire them to do the news. Secondly, the word "Photoshop" screamed itself across my brain as soon as I saw the photograph.
Among the many problems with this photo, the most important one was that the creature's eyes were glowing. This only happens when you take a photograph with a flash at night -- the glow is the reflection of the flash from the tapetum lucidum, a reflective membrane at the back of the retina of certain animals. Security cameras, not having flashes, wouldn't create this effect. So unless you believe that a zombie's eyes glow from the Fire of Their Inner Evil, this one seems to be a non-starter.
Watching this clip of course started me on a veritable orgy of monster-watching, and even if predictably I thought none of them convincing, I found a few that were worthy of honorable mention. My favorite one, in the chills department, is this one, which supposedly captures images of a "shadow creature" taken by some hikers who were using a videocamera. The videocamera was later found, Blair-Witch-style, and "no one has ever come to claim it." It's definitely creepy -- not to be watched at night. However, once again to point out only the main problem with it, it is supposed to come from "Emerson County" in which mysterious disappearances had occurred in 1957, and this camera was found only two miles from where those disappearances had taken place. Unfortunately for the creators of this video, there is no Emerson County in any state in the United States -- surprising, I know, but I just checked the official Index of Counties, and it goes from Emanuel County, Georgia to Emery County, Utah with nary an Emerson to be found. So, First Rule of Creepy Video Creation is: If you expect your viewers to believe that your video is real, don't state that it was taken in a place that does not, in fact, exist.
Here's another, with a bit of a frame from "The Paranormal Report." Besides the obvious problem with Clayton Morris' statement that the reporter who sent it in had no reason to fake it because he didn't want his name mentioned, there's another, and subtler problem with it, that makes me certain it's faked. Watch it and see if you can figure it out.
Ready for the answer?
The creature's shadow is pointing the wrong direction. Look at the shadow on the man's face; it's clear that the sun is coming from the right side of the frame (from the viewer's perspective), i.e. from behind the cameraman's right shoulder. The creature's shadow should therefore be pointing up and to the left (again, from the viewer's perspective). It points up and to the right. Unless "interdimensional creatures" block sunlight in a different fashion than we ordinary, plain-old-dimensional creatures, it's a fake.
This next one has all of the classic elements; hikers in a remote area, videotaping just for the hell of it, and accidentally capturing a clip of a bigfoot. "Did you see that... in the clearing!" is also required dialogue to insert somewhere in there. Even the site is well-chosen; Mt. St. Helens is supposedly the epicenter of Pacific Northwest bigfoot sightings. (There's a lava tube on the side of the mountain called "Ape Cave," which some claim is because of the prevalence of sasquatches in the area -- but the real explanation is more prosaic. It was named after a hiking group called the "St. Helens Apes" in the 1950s.) I don't have any particular reason to claim that this one's a hoax, except that I tend to instinctively doubt clips like this because of the obvious likelihood of fakery; but to my eyes, it does look a little more like a guy in a monkey suit than it does like my personal conception of bigfoot.
Lastly, I have to give some credit to the makers of this video. Myself, I didn't know that bigfoot wears Nike tennis shoes, but I guess even cryptozooids have to cave in to fashion trends in athletic wear. And the tag line "The people in the car and the cameraman were never heard from again" is pure brilliance.
Friday, January 14, 2011
This is the dawning of the Age of... Capricorn?
The hottest news today, for those who believe that their personalities, destinies, and love lives are controlled by the positions of distant planets relative to arbitrary patterns of even-more-distant stars, is: you're not the astrological sign you think you are.
The ancient Greeks are the ones who are responsible for a lot of the names we use for constellations today. They looked up into the night sky, probably after having tanked up on ouzo and retsina, and instead of seeing what most of us do -- a completely random arrangement of stars -- they saw patterns that reminded them of people, animals, and objects from their myths and folk tales. Thus we have a vague, wandery curve of faint stars that is Draco the Dragon, a pair of bright stars that is Canis Minor the Little Dog, a crooked zigzag that is Cassiopeia the Celestial Queen, and a little group of six stars that is Waldo the Sky Wombat.
Okay, I made the last one up. But some of them are equally weird. There's Coma Berenices, "Berenice's Hair;" Fornax the Furnace; Volans the Flying Fish; for people who like things simple and obvious, Triangulum the Triangle; and for people in the southern hemisphere who like things simple and obvious, Triangulum Australe the Southern Triangle.
Even earlier, astronomers during the Babylonian times had noticed that the sun and the planets seemed to trace a path against the stars, and that path is the zodiac. The twelve zodiac constellations are the ones that the sun seems to move through, as the earth travels around the sun; and your sign is supposed to be the constellation in which the sun seemed to reside at the moment of your birth.
But now, astronomers with the Minnesota Planetarium Society have released a bombshell. Because the Earth's axis precesses, the constellations of the zodiac aren't lined up the way they were during the time of the ancient Greeks. Precession happens because the Earth wobbles like a top as it spins, and the axis of the earth traces out a circular path every 26,000 years (meaning that Polaris won't be the North Star forever). As a result, the whole zodiac has tipped by about ten degrees, and most likely you aren't the sign you think you are -- you are the one immediately preceding it, or possibly even the one before that.
Worse news still if you're a Sagittarius; not only are you not a Sagittarius, your sign is likely to be a constellation that isn't even part of the standard zodiac. During Greek times, the zodiac actually passed briefly through the constellation Ophiucus, the Snake Handler, but because thirteen seemed an unpropitious number for the zodiac constellations, and also because "Ophiucus" sounds like the scientific name of an intestinal parasite, they threw it out. Now, however, because of the precession of the Earth, the zodiac spends a lot longer in Ophiucus, and it's no longer possible to ignore it. So if you were a Sagittarius, you're probably now an Ophiucus, and might want to consider a career as a herpetologist, or at least a snake charmer.
And I guess I'm not really a Scorpio. This is too bad. I kind of liked being a Scorpio. They're supposed to be deep, intense, passionate, secretive, and a little dangerous, which I always thought was cool. Now, I guess I'm a Virgo, which means I'm weak, stubborn, and petulant. So I've gone from being James Bond to being George Costanza. It figures.
Of course, I console myself with the knowledge that astrology is pretty silly anyhow; one has to wonder why anyone ever found it plausible that the fact that Saturn was in Capricorn at the moment of your birth is why you like cottage cheese. (Okay, I made that up because I don't feel like researching what it really means if Saturn is in Capricorn. But my point stands.) Right now, I'm mostly curious to see what the astrologers will do -- if they will revise their astrological charts to reflect the actual positions of the sun and planets relative to the stars, or if they'll keep doing what they've always done.
My money is on the latter. I'm guessing that they'll figure that they've never worried about a minor issue like whether their predictions have any basis in reality, so why start now?
The ancient Greeks are the ones who are responsible for a lot of the names we use for constellations today. They looked up into the night sky, probably after having tanked up on ouzo and retsina, and instead of seeing what most of us do -- a completely random arrangement of stars -- they saw patterns that reminded them of people, animals, and objects from their myths and folk tales. Thus we have a vague, wandery curve of faint stars that is Draco the Dragon, a pair of bright stars that is Canis Minor the Little Dog, a crooked zigzag that is Cassiopeia the Celestial Queen, and a little group of six stars that is Waldo the Sky Wombat.
Okay, I made the last one up. But some of them are equally weird. There's Coma Berenices, "Berenice's Hair;" Fornax the Furnace; Volans the Flying Fish; for people who like things simple and obvious, Triangulum the Triangle; and for people in the southern hemisphere who like things simple and obvious, Triangulum Australe the Southern Triangle.
Even earlier, astronomers during the Babylonian times had noticed that the sun and the planets seemed to trace a path against the stars, and that path is the zodiac. The twelve zodiac constellations are the ones that the sun seems to move through, as the earth travels around the sun; and your sign is supposed to be the constellation in which the sun seemed to reside at the moment of your birth.
But now, astronomers with the Minnesota Planetarium Society have released a bombshell. Because the Earth's axis precesses, the constellations of the zodiac aren't lined up the way they were during the time of the ancient Greeks. Precession happens because the Earth wobbles like a top as it spins, and the axis of the earth traces out a circular path every 26,000 years (meaning that Polaris won't be the North Star forever). As a result, the whole zodiac has tipped by about ten degrees, and most likely you aren't the sign you think you are -- you are the one immediately preceding it, or possibly even the one before that.
Worse news still if you're a Sagittarius; not only are you not a Sagittarius, your sign is likely to be a constellation that isn't even part of the standard zodiac. During Greek times, the zodiac actually passed briefly through the constellation Ophiucus, the Snake Handler, but because thirteen seemed an unpropitious number for the zodiac constellations, and also because "Ophiucus" sounds like the scientific name of an intestinal parasite, they threw it out. Now, however, because of the precession of the Earth, the zodiac spends a lot longer in Ophiucus, and it's no longer possible to ignore it. So if you were a Sagittarius, you're probably now an Ophiucus, and might want to consider a career as a herpetologist, or at least a snake charmer.
And I guess I'm not really a Scorpio. This is too bad. I kind of liked being a Scorpio. They're supposed to be deep, intense, passionate, secretive, and a little dangerous, which I always thought was cool. Now, I guess I'm a Virgo, which means I'm weak, stubborn, and petulant. So I've gone from being James Bond to being George Costanza. It figures.
Of course, I console myself with the knowledge that astrology is pretty silly anyhow; one has to wonder why anyone ever found it plausible that the fact that Saturn was in Capricorn at the moment of your birth is why you like cottage cheese. (Okay, I made that up because I don't feel like researching what it really means if Saturn is in Capricorn. But my point stands.) Right now, I'm mostly curious to see what the astrologers will do -- if they will revise their astrological charts to reflect the actual positions of the sun and planets relative to the stars, or if they'll keep doing what they've always done.
My money is on the latter. I'm guessing that they'll figure that they've never worried about a minor issue like whether their predictions have any basis in reality, so why start now?
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tell me suttin good
What do you call a long sandwich, on a French bread roll, usually with meat, shredded lettuce, and some kind of sauce?
What name you use for that delicious creation tells you a lot about what region of the country you grew up in. Most people in the western part of the US call 'em "hoagies." Here in upstate New York, they're "subs," but New York City folks call 'em "heroes." In the upper Midwest, they're "grinders." And in my home state of Louisiana -- "po' boys."
Regional accents abound in the United States, some different almost to the point of mutual incomprehensibility. Thus the joke:
A New York City guy was on vacation, and was driving with his girlfriend through rural Maine. Struck by a sudden romantic impulse, he pulled the car over, got out, hopped the low fence, and began to pick a bouquet of flowers from the field on the other side.
He'd not gotten very far when he noticed that he wasn't alone -- there was a bull staring at him, murder in his eye, pawing the ground. The poor city boy looked around frantically -- he was too far from the fence to get there first if the bull charged, and no trees nearby to climb. That was when he noticed an old farmer, leaning on the fence and watching the proceedings.
"Hey! Mister!" the guy yells. "That bull... is that bull safe?"
The farmer took his pipe out of his mouth, and thought for a moment. "Oh, ayuh," the farmer said. "He's safe." He thought for a minute more, and then added, "Can't say the same for you, howevuh."
And now a study by Jacob Eisenstein of Carnegie-Mellon Institute has shown that regional dialects aren't just limited to our speech -- they are developing in our tweets and texts, as well.
Eisenstein and his group analyzed the words used in 380,000 tweets -- a total of 4.5 million words. And they found that the origin of the tweet seemed to be strongly correlated with the presence of certain items of "text-speak" (the linguistic purist in me can't really call them "words").
Some weren't surprising; "yall" in the South, "yinz" in Pittsburgh, for the second person plural pronoun. Others, however, were strange, and were evidence that text-speak is developing its own regional character, independent of the dialect of the speaker. For example, "suttin" (for "something") was found all over New York City; "coo" or "koo" (for "cool") in California, with "koo" replacing "coo" and becoming progressively more common as you move northward through the state; and "hella" (for "very," as in "hella tired") in northern California through the Pacific Northwest.
I find this phenomenon fascinating, and also surprising. Regional dialects in American speech developed primarily because of two things. First, there are differences in the primary country of origin of the people who settled an area (e.g. France in southern Louisiana, Scotland and Northern Ireland in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, England in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine, and so on). Second, the lack of mobility in most populations prior to 1940 or so meant that any linguistic conventions that arose were unlikely to spread very far.
Now, however, with texting, emails, Twitter, and so far, you'd think that any spelling conventions and slang that arose would not be confined to one geographic region -- they'd spread so rapidly that either they'd catch fire and everyone would start using them, or they'd dilute out and vanish. Apparently, this isn't the case -- Eisenstein's study indicates that regardless of the fact that we're communicating more quickly, and over far greater distances, than ever before, we still tend to communicate like the folks we live with.
So, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of regional culture are a great exaggeration. That even applies, apparently, to text-speak and tweets. And given that these sorts of things are what give different parts of the USA their local color, I don't know about yinz, but I'm hella glad about that.
What name you use for that delicious creation tells you a lot about what region of the country you grew up in. Most people in the western part of the US call 'em "hoagies." Here in upstate New York, they're "subs," but New York City folks call 'em "heroes." In the upper Midwest, they're "grinders." And in my home state of Louisiana -- "po' boys."
Regional accents abound in the United States, some different almost to the point of mutual incomprehensibility. Thus the joke:
A New York City guy was on vacation, and was driving with his girlfriend through rural Maine. Struck by a sudden romantic impulse, he pulled the car over, got out, hopped the low fence, and began to pick a bouquet of flowers from the field on the other side.
He'd not gotten very far when he noticed that he wasn't alone -- there was a bull staring at him, murder in his eye, pawing the ground. The poor city boy looked around frantically -- he was too far from the fence to get there first if the bull charged, and no trees nearby to climb. That was when he noticed an old farmer, leaning on the fence and watching the proceedings.
"Hey! Mister!" the guy yells. "That bull... is that bull safe?"
The farmer took his pipe out of his mouth, and thought for a moment. "Oh, ayuh," the farmer said. "He's safe." He thought for a minute more, and then added, "Can't say the same for you, howevuh."
And now a study by Jacob Eisenstein of Carnegie-Mellon Institute has shown that regional dialects aren't just limited to our speech -- they are developing in our tweets and texts, as well.
Eisenstein and his group analyzed the words used in 380,000 tweets -- a total of 4.5 million words. And they found that the origin of the tweet seemed to be strongly correlated with the presence of certain items of "text-speak" (the linguistic purist in me can't really call them "words").
Some weren't surprising; "yall" in the South, "yinz" in Pittsburgh, for the second person plural pronoun. Others, however, were strange, and were evidence that text-speak is developing its own regional character, independent of the dialect of the speaker. For example, "suttin" (for "something") was found all over New York City; "coo" or "koo" (for "cool") in California, with "koo" replacing "coo" and becoming progressively more common as you move northward through the state; and "hella" (for "very," as in "hella tired") in northern California through the Pacific Northwest.
I find this phenomenon fascinating, and also surprising. Regional dialects in American speech developed primarily because of two things. First, there are differences in the primary country of origin of the people who settled an area (e.g. France in southern Louisiana, Scotland and Northern Ireland in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, England in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine, and so on). Second, the lack of mobility in most populations prior to 1940 or so meant that any linguistic conventions that arose were unlikely to spread very far.
Now, however, with texting, emails, Twitter, and so far, you'd think that any spelling conventions and slang that arose would not be confined to one geographic region -- they'd spread so rapidly that either they'd catch fire and everyone would start using them, or they'd dilute out and vanish. Apparently, this isn't the case -- Eisenstein's study indicates that regardless of the fact that we're communicating more quickly, and over far greater distances, than ever before, we still tend to communicate like the folks we live with.
So, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of regional culture are a great exaggeration. That even applies, apparently, to text-speak and tweets. And given that these sorts of things are what give different parts of the USA their local color, I don't know about yinz, but I'm hella glad about that.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Lost among the familiar
I have this peculiar inability. I seem to be entirely unable to form mental maps. I can, thank heaven, follow a regular old map, but without one, I'm sort of perpetually lost.
We visited family in Northampton, Massachusetts over the holidays, a town I've been to many times. No matter how many times we go, I don't seem to be able to figure the place out. I was driving on our way home, and as we were winding through the streets of Northampton, I was completely relying on my wife (the woman has an internal GPS system, I swear) to get me back to I-91.
I can't even begin to estimate the number of times I've been lost. My usual method when I'm lost is to drive in a straight line until I see something familiar, which works okay around Ithaca but would not work so well in, say, Nebraska. And your definition of "familiar" and mine probably differ somewhat. You'd think that the stores and so forth in Northampton would be familiar by now, and in one sense they are; in fact, they're too familiar.
All physical landmarks pretty much look the same to me. In Northampton, there are lots of brick buildings and 19th-century wood frame houses in pretty pastel colors. Around here, there are fields and cows and houses and silos and so forth. It's not that nothing looks familiar; everything does. So, in the previous paragraph, by "familiar" I mean "so weird and stand-out that it's the only landmark of its kind in this entire time zone." I only know that I'm approaching our exit from I-88, for example, because there is this huge structure -- I think it must be a radio transceiver or something -- that has been dressed up to look like a tree. It is about twice as tall as all the other, real organic trees in the area, so the effect is not so much "Natural" as it is "Mutant Redwood from Outer Space." It's unmistakable, and can be seen from about ten miles away. That is the kind of landmark I need.
So, I constantly feel like I'm lost among the familiar. When I'm in Manhattan it's especially bad, because almost all the streets meet at perfect right angles, and everywhere there are stores and businesses and people. And they all look alike. I think the only two sufficiently stand-out landmarks in Manhattan are Times Square and the Public Library, but if you only have two reference points and are not even all that sure where those are, it's really not all that helpful.
There's also the problem, when I'm on foot, of never knowing which direction I'm facing. At least when I see the mutant redwood I'm always coming at it from the same direction. If I'm seeing Times Square, and I'm trying to find my hotel, I have to know (a) what direction I'm seeing Times Square from, (b) what direction the hotel is from Times Square, and (c) what direction I have to turn to be pointed in the direction referenced in (b). Usually, my choice is (d), walk in a straight line in some random direction and hope the hotel magically appears. So far, I've been lucky, but mostly that's because when I'm in an unfamiliar place, I make sure to keep Carol less than five feet away from me at all times. Occasionally, however, Carol will let me walk a little ahead, and just watch to see what I do when I get to a street corner. This is when things get interesting.
On one visit to Manhattan, we were returning to our hotel from a night at the theater, and I asked Carol what direction the hotel was from our current position.
"North," she said.
So when we got to the next street corner, she informed me that we needed to turn right. So I did. And then I said, "Now what direction is the hotel from where we are?"
She looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "It's still north," she said.
"It can't be," I said, adopting the really annoying Patient Teacher Voice I bring out when dealing with an especially slow student. "You said it was north before, and then we turned a corner. It can't still be north."
Carol stared at me, open-mouthed, and finally said, "Um, Gordon? The position of the North Pole does not change every time you go around a corner."
Oh. Right. I guess I knew that.
It's a little frustrating that I was seemingly born without the Directionality Brain Module, but I guess I make up for it by my extra-special Tune-Remembering Brain Module and Name-Recall Brain Module. All in all, I can't complain. But if I ever turn up missing, don't be surprised. You might suggest searching in Nebraska.
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