Filed under: About Pigspittle
Out of 26 registered sex offenders in Pigspittle, five—nearly 20%—have “Lee” as either a middle name or first name.
The last week has been filled with visiting friends and family, celebrating Christmas, and driving from Pigspittle to Cowtown, from Cowtown to Pigspittle, from Pigspittle to Lintville, and back again. Here are a few highlights:
- It was a Christmas to sustain my inner-geek. Husband gave me a levitating globe and that very cool science experiment kit from National Geographic. [Note to self: be sure to mention specific products again in blog next year as hints to Husband—it works! ] Also received an adorable pair of pj’s —fabric, astronomically themed with moons, stars, suns; a moon globe; a book by the very funny John Hodgman; a plushy bathrobe; and far more good stuff than I deserve.
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Yes, But Could They Do a Triple Lutz? Archaeological evidence shows that bone skates (skates made of animal bones) are the oldest human-powered means of transport, dating back to 3000 BC. Why people started skating on ice and where is not as clear, since ancient remains were found in several locations spread across Central and North Europe.
In a recent paper, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society of London, Dr. Federico Formenti and Professor Minetti show substantial evidence supporting the hypothesis that the birth of ice skating took place in Southern Finland, where the number of lakes within 100 square kilometres is the highest in the world.
Filed under: Holiday
Wishing you a peaceful holiday and fabulous new year.
Could a Monkey Really Do Your Job? Boxer and Feinstein, two female rhesus macaque monkeys presumably named after California’s U.S. Senators, demonstrated that they could perform mental addition nearly as well as college students. According to scientists Jessica F. Cantlon and Elizabeth M. Brannon of Duke University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, “…Monkeys perform approximate mental addition in a manner that is remarkably similar to the performance of the college students. These findings support the argument that humans and nonhuman primates share a cognitive system for nonverbal arithmetic, which likely reflects an evolutionary link in their cognitive abilities.” The researchers published their findings in PLoS Biology. According to a press release from Duke, “While the college students were correct 94 percent the time and the monkeys 76 percent, the average response time for both monkeys and humans was about one second.” In previous research, Cantlon and Brannon discovered that “monkeys have a semantic perception of numbers that is like humans’ and which is independent of language.”
I attended my first Office Christmas Party yesterday. I’ve managed to escape the Dilbertesque experience of white-collar employment until now. All the offices I’ve worked in either didn’t host a party or were too small to fit into the cartoon image in my head of seeing co-workers drunk for the first time, making passes at others and asses out of themselves. Not that my co-workers yesterday were unexpectedly raucous—well, one was (more on him later). I was dreading it in the same way that I dread wedding or baby showers, or any kind of forced social interaction that involves games.
Yesterday I met a colleague for coffee, our usual weekly meeting. She is late, runs in with her notebooks, puts them down on the table, says, “I’ve got to get my mom out of the car. Be right back.” I’m not surprised by this; she had emailed to say that her mom, Mary, had a doctor’s appointment before our meeting.
Mary needs help walking. I think she broke her hip earlier this year, though I can’t say for sure. Her spine is curved like the cane she leans on and I wonder how tall she would be if she hadn’t lost so much bone and gravity didn’t pull at her. I try to imagine how she sees the world with her head bent—is it like how I read when I’m wearing my glasses, over the top, missing details out of the periphery, catching only half of the words in front of me?
Filed under: Politics
Is waterboarding torture? Ask nearly any CIA or White House official and you will not get a straight answer:
Porter Goss, former CIA director (2005), to ABC News: “I don’t know.”
Commenting on whether or not a “dunk in the water” (i.e., waterboarding) is torture, Cheney told a McClatchy reporter, “It’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president ‘for torture.’ ” Then in Christian Science Monitor: “A spokeswoman for Cheney denied that he confirmed, or endorsed, the use of (waterboarding) by US interrogators.”
JP’s comment last week mentioned the Fliptwisters. Allow me to explain.
The Fliptwisters were a bunch of elementary school kids who performed “tricks.” That’s what we called our gymnastics-ish routines—we were too young and our world was still innocent enough not to snicker over some conjectured double entendre.
Led by our gym teacher (we’ll call him Mr. M), we met for an hour every morning before school and at least two hours after school, practicing and learning new tricks. We performed choreographed tumbling, unicycle, and mini-tramp routines during intermission at college basketball games, at old folks’ homes, for disabled kids, during parades. I was a member of the “Spanish Fleas,” the elite tumblers who performed increasingly more difficult tricks, from forward rolls to aerial front-walkovers, down the mat to the tune of Spanish Flea (most of you will know the song from a Simpsons episode but to those of us alive in 1965, it was a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass hit). Yes, indeed.
Filed under: Science
This Science Saturday is a salute to Mount Washington. Not for any particular reason, except that I have pictures of it and it’s one of my favorite places in the world (never mind that I haven’t gotten around much). It’s the tallest peak in the northeast and belongs to New Hampshire’s Presidential Range in the White Mountains. It’s also known as the site of the world’s worst weather, which may explain why I love it so. (more…)
