All the President’s Slime Mold Beetles

A few months ago, my boss found something brown and fuzzy growing out of the molding in one of the offices at work. When she called me in to look at the mystery growth, I realized it was a slime mold (I knew there was a reason I took those botany classes in college) and headed off to try to find it on Google.

Before I could figure out what kind of slime mold it was, I got distracted by this Cornell University news release. Apparently two entomologists named three new species of slime mold beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, among others:

The entomologists also named some of the new species after their wives and a former wife, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, the Aztecs, the fictional “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader (“who shares with A. vaderi a broad, shiny, helmetlike head”), Frances Fawcett (their scientific illustrator) and the Greek words for “ugly” and “having prominent teeth” and the Latin word for “strange.”

Strangely enough, the scientists said this was a tribute

A Fair d’État Encore

Why oh why didn’t I get my act together to go to Paris for the Salon d’Agriculture?

As if I weren’t envious enough before, now Kelly Sans Culotte and her friend Harriet have posted a video chronicling their visit to this year’s Salon.

You can find more photos and video at Kelly’s Salon blog.

Petri Dish Paintings

Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob from Tel Aviv University photographs the patterns made by bacteria growing on petri dishes.

Ben-Jacob’s Web site features a gallery of microbial art. He writes:

While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms. The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature.

(Via Pruned)

Low-Tech Support

I’ve never officially worked tech support, but I’ve been the unofficial techie in a lot of places where I’ve worked. And I’ve fielded my share of frantic late-night computer questions from my parents.

All of which means that I spent far too much time watching and rewatching this video and laughing.

Attack of the Language Cranks

If you follow Language Log at all (and I do), you know that there’s no shortage of language mavens ready to jump on the least usage offense as evidence that the English language is going to hell, with or without handbasket.

Just yesterday, Geoff Pullum posted about software designed to identify all the adverbs in your browser window, presumably so you can go back and strip them from your prose. My favorite bit of Pullum’s post:

Strunk and White were a pair of hypocritical old grousers whose inaccurate grammar and usage edicts dated not from the last century but the one before that. Yet people not only treat them as if their words came from God and had been chiseled into granite slabs during an encounter up a mountain; they also fail to read those words to see if the old fools practice what they preach. Of course they don’t.

(Note that Pullum’s writing doesn’t seem to suffer in the slightest, despite his disdain for the self-styled usage police.)

On some level, I know that it’s not just Anglophones who are obsessed with saving their language from its speakers. Sitting on the shelf alongside my bed is a copy of linguist Fredrik Lindström’s Världens Dåligaste Språk (World’s Baddest Language), which is essentially an extended rebuttal to all the Swedes who think that the standards for Swedish are sinking ever lower and that, by the way, it’s World’s Worst Language, thank you very much.

So I don’t know why I was so surprised this morning when I stumbled on a review (from the Indian newspaper The Hindu) of a new usage manual for Telegu Telugu speakers. All the familiar prescriptivist gripes are present: standards in schools and textbooks are slipping, the media compounds the problem, etc.

The Things People Buy

I went to Froogle to see what sort of price I could find for a piece of music manuscript software, and somehow I got sidetracked by their “a few of the items recently found on Froogle” feature. High up on the list was “fleece ferret hammock.”

I don’t know which is stranger: that people actually have a need for fleece ferret hammocks or that I’ve actually seen one (owned by a former housemate — I do not now, nor have I ever owned ferrets).

Religion in a Time of Crisis

As soon I read the first sentence of this New York Times article on the resurgence of religion in China, I thought of one of the postdocs at work who researches the resurgence of shamanism in Mongolia since the collapse of socialism. Reviving the old religious practices gave the people she studied a way of coping with and explaining economic crisis.

Sure enough, as I read further, I came upon a similar hypothesis about the Chinese revival:

Chinese experts say the growing popularity of religious belief has been driven by social crises involving corruption and the expanding gap between rich and poor.

Naturally, I’m now wondering how much of the US’s current bout of piety has to do with our own wealth gap and sense of economic uncertainty.

Wasabi: Tasty Treat or Toxic Spill?

Once again Discovery News comes through with wacky science news.

Wasabi has been banned from the International Space Station after an astronaut spilled some of the horseradish-like, Japanese condiment. In the weightless environment of the station, the pungent,  green paste flew everywhere, creating quite the clean-up challenge for the crew.

Refrigerator Bestiary

I really have no excuse for not mentioning this sooner, but my sister Mars is brilliant!

Every day during January, she made a refrigerator magnet of a different organism as part of Fun-A-Day, an annual event sponsored by Artclash, a Philadelphia artists’ collective. Participants do a different creative project every day for a month and then exhibit the fruits of their labors at the collective’s gallery space.

To the left, you can see a smaller version of some of my favorites including the paramecium, the okapi and the luna moth (complete with googly eye eyespots).

And here are some links to photos of the rest of the project, which Mars is calling The Felt Ark:

• Paramecium, cardinal, okapi, luna moth (large version) {click}
• Man of war fish (behind bouclé tentacles), okapi, magpie {click}
• Wooly mammoth, hammerhead shark, T. rex, E. coli {click}
• Giant squid (with a bit of tapeworm above), red-winged blackbird, hickory horned devil (aka royal walnut moth) caterpillar, Komodo dragon {click}
• Great horned owl, octopus, black-eyed Susan, star-nosed mole {click}
• Goldfish, polar bear, red-headed woodpecker {click}
• Fruit bat, fly agaric mushroom, blue-footed booby {click}
• Stinkhorn fungus, narwhal, slake moth (okay, so this last one’s fictional) {click}
• House cat, Portuguese man of war {click}
• The entire Ark {click}

And, as if that weren’t enough, Mars gave all her siblings magnets as Christmas presents. My fridge now sports a great horned owl, an octopus and a giant squid alongside the Roquefort cheese magnet I bought in France and the durian and rambutan magnets from a Vietnamese grocery in New York.

Update:

None of the above-linked pictures give you a really good view of the tapeworm magnet, but I found an old picture Mars sent me and uploaded it. You can view it here.

A Fair D’État

My friend Kelly Sans Culotte is heading off to the Salon d’Agriculture (Agriculture Expo) in Paris this week, and I’m incredibly envious. I once organized an entire trip to Paris so I could attend this event, where farmers from all over France bring their livestock to the big Porte de Versailles convention center on the outskirts of the 15th Arrondissement.

I think it was Yann-Arthus Bertrand’s photographs of larger-than-life cattle, sheep and pigs with their proud owners that convinced me I needed to attend. Well, that and finding out that the Salon was like a big state fair with wine and cheese contests instead of giant pumpkin and pie-eating contests. After you’ve visited the livestock, you can stroll through the two hangar-sized buildings filled with booths selling representative foods from all the different regions of France and treat yourself to the Salon’s answer to funnel cakes and corn dogs: crepes and foie gras. 

When I was studying cooking in Paris, I dragged some school chums to the fair to ogle the Blonds — the Blonds D’Aquitaine, that is. This breed of beef cattle comes from the Southwest part of France originally. I could swear that some of the blond cows we saw were larger than most of the Renaults and Smart Cars I saw driving around Paris.