My forest is dark and forbidding at first; tall, mysterious firs filtering the sunlight onto the green, green moss. Then it breaks up, splinters, pines occupying the lichen-clad hillocks, deciduous trees (mostly birch and aspen) competing for space in the lower spaces. In some places miniature wetlands form, circled by ferns.

It’s a varied landscape, full of surprises, new discoveries around every bend of the path. And so far, we’ve had it almost to ourselves, but I don’t know how long that will last - there’s an increasing number of people turning up to pick mushrooms each year…

forests

As most science blogs are a-bustle discussing this years Nobel prize “winners” (very odd, term, that), I thought I’d take a look at the Ig Nobels instead. Unfortunately I must say that this year’s crop wasn’t nearly as good as last year’s.

The Ig Nobel prize is awarded research that makes you “LAUGH and then THINK”. Highlights from previous years includes:

2005, Peace: “Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie “Star Wars.”"

Awesome. If I were to become an experimental biologist, this sort of stuff is totally what I’d get up to.

2006, Biology: “Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.”

To be fair - is anyone really surprised?

2007, Linguistics: “Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.”

Almost too bizarre for comment. I love it.

This is all funny stuff, right? So what do we get this year? Well, the biology prize is pretty giggle-worthy: Dog fleas jump higher than cat fleas. Ehehe. But the Cognitive Science Prize? Awarded to the people who discovered that slime molds can solve puzzles! The idea that this is OMG TEH LULZ baffles me. I simply thought it was really freaking cool.

Maybe this is why the other kids wouldn’t play with me. Sniffle.

science, ig nobel

After rhetorics class today, I was discussing voice pitch with some classmates. It’s generally a good idea to assume a deep voice when speaking in front of an audience, to avoid sounding hysterical and give your subject matter some gravity. Of course, women are often at a bit of a disadvantage, seeing as how many of us don’t have very deep voices. In a desperate bid to be heard, it’s easy to start straining your voice and/or screaming - even if you have a microphone. (For the record, I’m an alto and don’t really have this problem.)

That this is a very real disadvantage has been made clear by american politics, where one of the main arguments against Hillary Clinton’s candidacy seemed to be that she has a shrill voice. And now, liberal bloggers who were pissed off by this unfair treatment of a female candidate are doing the very same thing against Sarah Palin. (Myers, I’m looking at you…) Just google ‘Palin “I hate her voice”‘, see what I mean.

Ok, so her voice is not very nice to listen to. But surely, she can’t help it? Sometimes no matter how much you train your voice, you simply can’t make it sound any better in front of an audience. Sure, she could do something about that accent, but … huh, wait a minute.

In the older clips she actually sounds like she has half a brain! The Salon piece covering this talks about her accent, but listen to her voice. It’s relaxed, soft, feminine and not shrill at all. She’s actually making an effort to sound awful.

Gosh darnit. There goes my argument.

sarah palin, rhetorics

Ever noticed how words lose their meaning if you say them over and over again?

This story - the photo, in particular - makes me want to make a couple of t-shirts for me and my boyfriend. One will say “Gride” and one will say “Broom”.

This is really all I have to say about the matter, except that homophobia is totally gay.

ETA: Apparently, someone got there before me! Good for them!

gay marriage

Yesterday me and two of my brothers finally got around to seeing WALL-E. I know, I know, we’re hopelessly far behind. Even in Sweden, this movie’s on it’s way out from the cinemas. But we caught it just in time! So, what did I think?

I’m at a loss for words. It’s seriously one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time, and THE best film in its genre. And I don’t even know why! Was it the stunning visuals? The lack of dialogue? The almost, but not quite, unbearable cuteness of WALL-E itself?

Without being at any point obviously tragic, it was the most touching movie I’ve ever experienced. And not just at a few carefully selected emotional climaxes, but pretty much all throughout the film. The opening scene nearly made me cry. But maybe I’m just a big sop - while I was nigh chewing on my knuckles, others in the audience were loudly commenting how adorable it was. (Why is it that it’s apparently ok to keep babbling throughout a film as long as it’s marketed as a children’s movie? The children have the rather obvious excuse of being children, but why do the adults find it so damn difficult to shut their face?)

Apart from being touching, WALL-E also had a lot of humour, and a decent story. Oh, and a complete lack of evil super-villains. Apart from the rather strong hint that we ought to take better care of the earth, there was no moralising, no take-home-message apart from… y’know, that fuzzy warm feeling.

So, regardless of who you are, this movie is a must-see. Well, ok, if you’re one of those ridiculously macho people who won’t ever admit to having emotions, maybe it isn’t for you. Far be it from me to suggest that you watch it alone when no one’s watching…

wall-e

Slime molds are weird things. Originally thought to be a group of fungi, they’re now considered to be paraphyletic - that is, not a natural group of related species. And they’re not fungi, either. Also, I can’t quite tell if they’re supposed to be unicellular or multicellular organisms, as they begin their life cycle as amoebas that eventually aggregate, as food grows scarce, to collectively form fruiting bodies. Earlier this year it was reported that slime molds can learn to navigate labyrinths. What this says about intelligence and consciousness remains to be seen.

The specimen/s below I discovered on a mushroom-hunt near my parents’ place. I suppose it’s feeding on the rotten wood.

The more you study biology, the more you realise that all of these classifications we invent are purely for our own convenience. Nature doesn’t care if we would like to divide it into unicellular and multicellular, or about what definition of “species” we want to use. There’s always something out there that defies explanation until we’ve restructured our thoughts and language. Slime molds are one such example.

slime molds, biology

Images of Jesus and his virgin mother have been known to pop up in the most unlikely places, such as dirty sinks. The conspicuous lack of other deities on toasts and bathroom doors has been a source of some confusion for atheists - after all, if all gods are equally unlikely to exist, all of them should be equally likely to appear randomly!*

Fortunately a Swedish Muslim provides some comfort: Swedish Muslim finds Muhammad in a mango. Praise Allah!

“When I sliced the mango in two, ‘Allah’ was written in one half and ‘Muhammad’ in the other. It’s a miracle, a sign from Allah,” said Sheikh to the Metro newspaper.

Of course there’s always some stupid academic spoiling the fun:

“There are 14 recognized ways to create the word ‘Allah’. When you think about how many mangoes there are out there, it’s not strange that one of them has a pattern which can be interpreted to be the right combination of characters,” said Jan Hjärpe [emeritus professor in Islam] to Metro.

Seriously though. What kind of self-respecting god would write his name and the name of his prophet in a rotting mango? What kind of cheap-ass miracle is that? And what kind of believer will settle for something like that from a god who is supposed to be wise and merciful and all-powerful?

A ROTTING MANGO?!

I guess we’re lucky it wasn’t a picture of Muhammad in there, or the fruit merchant would certainly have sold his last mango.

Friday pic coming up. It does not involve mangoes.

* I’m lying. There’s no confusion. And I think most of my readers get that but am writing this footnote just in case: We’re not confused at all. People see what they want to see. It’s that simple.

islam, allah, muhammad, mangoes, miracles

Recent additions to my blogroll:

At Tetrapod Zoology, Darren Naish writes fun and informative posts about what’s starting to emerge as one of my favourite areas of biology.

KafirGirl is reading the Quran, so I don’t have to. Also, there are LOLmuslims. Really can’t beat that.

a Nadder!, written by Michael Fridman, is a little difficult to describe. It’s got a certain something, but I can’t quite tell what it is that sets it apart from other atheist blogs. Just go there and find out for yourself.

blogs

Most of the fiction I read is fantasy or scifi. (Like with tv series, I’m of the opinion that if you’re gonna make things up, you might as well make the most of it. My life already contains most of the components of drama series and soap operas, so there’s no need to watch them.) Most fantasy and scifi, like most literature really, is crap, which is why I only read books that have been recommended by someone I trust (or sometimes if they seem extremely interesting).

One of the authors recommended to me is Sheri S. Tepper, which is why I’m currently plowing through her work. I read Beauty a few years ago, an now I’ve read Grass, Raising the Stones and have just started on Sideshow. Tepper has her own style and set of topics she likes to explore, somewhere in the fuzzy grey area where pure scifi meets fantastic fantasy. One of the topics is religion, and I must admit I really enjoy considering her scenarios, as unlikely as they may seem.

For instance, consider a God that actually Works. It makes people work for them (a little), but it also makes them happy, contented and healthy, and it doesn’t remove their sense of free will. Are these people enslaved? Why is it that because the “God” is physically present and clearly a living organism, we view it differently from how we would a benevolent invisible sky-father doing the same thing?

I especially like that Tepper doesn’t tell us readers what we’re supposed to think. An amazon reviewer (which I’m not going to link to as the review spoils most of the plot) thought this was a weakness in Grass - that the author didn’t explore her own philosophical problems and left too many questions unanswered. I think it’s exactly the other way around. Her books make me think, rather than tells me what she thinks I ought to think. Perhaps this is simply my preference as someone who occasionally enjoys puzzling over philosophical conundrums. If you’re looking for pure entertainment, Tepper’s books are definitely not for you.

Another author whose work I’ve really enjoyed is Robin Hobb. At first I avoided the Farseer Trilogy, as books about an assassin written by a guy really didn’t seem very promising at all. Then I was told Hobb is actually a woman (whose name is actually Margaret), and that her books under the Hobb pseudonym are actually very good. I was not disappointed. I haven’t read her older works (written under the name of Megan Lindholm), but the three trilogies Farseer, Liveship Traders and Tawny Man are absolutely worth anyone’s time. They’re written in a European medieval fantasy setting, but the lack of elves and dwarves and “conventional” magic make for a refreshing change from the standard high/pulp fantasy.

There are obviously other authors and books I’ve enjoyed, and I’ll probably come back to this topic in the future, but that’s enough rambling about fiction for now. If you have any suggestions for books I absolutely must put on my reading list, please do tell!

On a sidenote: XKCD tells it like it is, again.

What is the point of making up words for things that already have english designations? In a fairly entertaining pulp fantasy series I’m currently re-reading, the authors saw fit to randomly introduce a term that apparently meant “fortnight”; a term used only once in the seven books and which served no purpose other than giving them an excuse to put another explanatory footnote in there. Why? Why did the authors not realise that introducing that term was absolutely unnecessary? Why didn’t the proofreaders (assuming there were any) call them out on it? I don’t get it.

fantasy, scifi, sheri s. tepper, robin hobb, xkcd