perfidy

Some pharmacist should lose a license over this, I guess. Either that or a zoologist, if such even have licenses.

Never give an iguana Viagra

Thu Jan 25, 2007 12:04pm ET

ANTWERP, Belgium (Reuters) - Mozart, an iguana with an erection that has lasted for over a week, will have his penis amputated in the next couple of days.

Veterinarians at Antwerp's Aquatopia had sought to treat the animal's problem, but decided removal was the only solution because of the risk of infection. The good news for Mozart and his mates is that male iguanas have two penises.

Mozart, sitting on the shoulders of his keeper as camera crews focused on his red, swollen erection, seemed unperturbed by the news.

"It doesn't bother him. He doesn't know what amputation means," said vet Luc Lambrecht, adding that Mozart's sexual activity should be undimmed by the operation.

"I don't think so. That's all in his head."

I'm happy to report that the Reuters report doesn't contain any pictures of swollen, red, iguana junk, so it's safe for work. I don't know which is sillier - the fact that someone gave the iguana Viagra, or the fact that some (presumedly different) person can assert, apparently straight-faced, that his sexual performance is all in his head.

[wik] This posting might be mis-titled - the iguana doesn't seem to actually have been too embarrassed by this malpractice.

[alsø wik] I wonder what role the physiology of the iguana plays in the psychology of penis envy?

[alsø alsø wik] The Reuters article might just as logically been entitled "Never Give an Iguana a Lit M-80 for Lunch", come to think of it.

Just heard, in a phone conversation with my buddy Ian:

He was speaking with a friend of his, during an event today in Orlando, and they discussed the fertility specialist that the friend and his wife were seeing, due to their difficulty conceiving a child.

His friend went in to visit the specialist, and the nurse handed him a cup and asked him to produce a specimen. After heading down to a fairly generic restroom and grabbing a stall, he did so, bringing the cup back to the nurse.

Who looked at it and said "No, I needed a urine specimen".

Ian asked him "So what did you do then?". Turns out he just left, utterly crushed by embarrassment, though he's since recovered after realizing that what he did, wanted or not, was something he'd been practicing his whole life for.

Ever the clown/instigator, Ian pointed out to him that he'd handled it all wrong, and should instead have replied "What do you think this is?"

I guess killing all those cats caught up to him.

Bush Finds Error In Fermilab Calculations

BATAVIA, IL-Bush, who describes himself as "something of an armchair physicist," said that anyone could have made that mistake.

Just for Buckethead. Well, that, plus it's kind of funny, in a "blast from the past" sort of way.

It is natural for us to assume that the attractive and wealthy are actually stupid. This is a face saving gesture, for otherwise, how are we to accept the fact that we, with our much greater intelligence and savvy, are not rolling in bling and surrounded by attractive and loose-moralled members of the opposite sex? In at least once case, however, this is not the truth. Witness, Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics.

[wik] I have been warned that the above-referenced website may, in places, be unsafe for work. Meaning, there may be tits and whatnot in plain view. I have not perused the entire site, as my interest in semi-conductor physics is only slightly higher than my interest in Ms. Spears. So, take whatever measures you feel are appropriate for your continued safe employment.

The Economist has an interesting bit on Free Will, or the ever decreasing residuum that is all that remains after modern neuroscience has had its way. I've often wondered when drunk whether we really had that much free will. I like the idea of free will, but it seems to me that there is a lot less of it than most people suppose. To the extent that I can look inside my head and determine what goes on, often it seems that consciousness is less a matter of choice, but rather one of explanation. It is a part of my mind that explains or offers a narrative of decisions, impulses or reactions that were happening elsewhere. Not that I ever bought into any sort of Calvinist predestination - I think that's a load of crap. Really, I'm just a self-propelled meat puppet.

This weed can eat pesticide for breakfast, resist the Mexican army for lunch, and kick your ass for dinner.

If shooting femtosecond blasts of laser energy turns the surface of any metal into a radiation sucking blackness, I'm thinking that a really, really black car wouldn't be all that vulnerable to state trooper radar.

The new scientist (same as the old scientist) reports that the new wave of lifestyle drugs are those that allow us to self-modify our sleep architecture. And more, and more subtle and powerful, drugs are in the pipeline. Wakefulness promoters, sleep enhancers, anti-narcoleptics, all this and more will allow you to stay awake for days at a time without the edginess and irritability (not to mention geek stigma) of Jolt(tm) and to recharge your batteries in no time at all with a two hour, all slow wave power nap. As much as I love sleep - and Mrs. Buckethead will attest to the deep and abiding respect I have for sleep - being asleep is suboptimal for getting things done.

I seem to remember some time ago that someone had a drug that could block the need for sleep, but this article doesn't mention it. Pro- something.

My grandmother used to say that everyone had a special purpose. In our family, this has come to mean that everyone has a superpower. Not necessarily a really cool special power like regeneration or flying or being bulletproof, but rather an odd or uncanny ability that can only be explained by reference to Grandma's saying. I have finally figured out what my dog's special power is.

He has the amazing ability to see a short distance into the future to determine what I or my wife will be doing, so that he can go there and lay down to sleep.

CNN has a story about injecting children with growth hormone. For their own good.

The video is brief, but compelling. Parents, seeking the best for their sons, look to chemistry to grow their small children. Opponents say it's wrong for a variety of reasons you might guess without watching; a diminutive adult says he'd do it even now if he could because being small (5'3" in his case) just sucks so bad.

I guess the story resonated with me as a new father, who's still settling into the role of example-setter and role model. If my son seemed to be tracking toward tiny, would I turn to hormones to grow him? Would the pain and possible side-effects, not to mention gambling that the treatment's completely ineffective, outweigh a small height gain?

Even if I could get insurance to cover it- as the parents profiled did, which seems just this side of miraculous- I don't think I would.

Those parents' ultimate concern is for their sons' self-esteem, allowing for a well-adjusted adult and one that, as a man who fell within "normal" height range, would be that much less challenged in the quest for jobs, careers, and chicks. Their contention is that short men are more challenged, more limited, than "tall" men, and due to no fault of their own.

I think though that self esteem is more rightly rooted in achievement than physical stature. A guy who's 6'4 but spends his days collecting empty cans is not a winner. A man who's 5'6 and a blackbelt in tae-kwon-do is a winner. I'm 6' even, mebbe 6'1 in boots; I've known tons of men taller than me, and tons shorter than me. And with very few exceptions, I've worked for the ones shorter than me. And I'm not exactly setting the world on fire with my scary finances and swinging career possibilities. At the end of the day, I find some satisfaction in writing projects or other activities that have nothing to do with my job, my family, or, of all things, my height. It's those sorts of things, challenges that I've overcome, that allow me to look men in the eye. It has nothing to do with my physical stature. And I try to block out the stuff that I've utterly failed at.

One point that was overlooked in the CNN piece was that the taller you get, the harder alot of mundane tasks become. Again, I have to apply my own experiences, in this cae with continual back pain. Every so often, if I'm not very careful with my body mechanics, it can cause excruciating pain for days, if not weeks- we're talking painkillers for 3 meals a day.

And it's as someone who must be so careful with how he moves that I realize how much of our world is built for people who are about 5'7. See how far you have to bend over to do anything in the bathroom- lift the seat, flush, reach soap or anything else on the sink, turn faucets, wash your hands, take a shower- a dozen little things we do that are perfectly normal and routine but tough for a bigger person trying to keep his back straight. I joke about raising everything about 3" once I'm in charge, just so I can reach it without having to squat. Seriously, a typical bathroom sink barely comes up to about my crotch. Picking something up off the floor can be an adventure in pain management. Cars that sit 2" off the ground- which these days seems like all of them- are completely out of the question; folding myself into a sporty car is unthinkable. And let me emphasize that I'm hardly Shaq, here.

All of which just points out that being an average-sized man is not so flipping terrific either.

Look, people get gigs for alot reasons- talent, effort, luck, nepotism- but I am skeptical that someone ever got a job because he was tall. Money I think works similarly; I've never gotten a check due to my height. And chicks? Hey, different women go for different men. But most of all, chicks dig winners- short or tall.

I think the Li'lest Lethal will probably end up about my height, as his mother's about 5'8/9 herself, but I'm certainly not going to encourage him to let his physical dimensions- whatever they may be later- to be the basis for his self worth. I hope that if I can encourage, support, and guide my son toward achieving goals that are important to him, he can be a big winner in the end- even if he's not big.

My wife commonly associates bacteria and viruses on food with sickness. She gets all squirmy whenever I, in the course of preparing a meal, touch raw meat and then vegetables. Were she Jewish, I think that Mrs. Buckethead would be very comfortable indeed with Kosher food handling practices. Myself, I feel that heat kills anything that my stomach won't, and don't worry too much. Food researchers have recently come up with a couple innovations that will on the one hand make Mrs. Buckethead more comfortable, and on the other give her the heebidy-jeebidies.

The first innovation is a newly FDA-approved viral additive for hot dogs and sausages and cold cuts. The viruses, in solution, are sprayed on the meat of your choice, whereupon they hunt down and kill the bad bacteria that live on, and feed off of our beloved ground meat products. When injested, these are the bacteria that give us tummy aches, or even kill us. The first preparation of six viruses targets the bacteria that causes Listeria, an illness that sickens 2500 Americans a year, and kills 500. We may assume that further viral add-ons are in the works.

Our second innovation is a special concoction of bacteria which will be added to gum, toothpaste and mouthwash. It seems that Strepptococcus mutans, or S. Mutans is a cause of tooth decay. Our new ally is another bacterium, a new strain of lactobacillus called L. anti-caries, forces S. Mutans to clump together, preventing them from becoming attached to the tooth surface. Sweet, maybe now I won't have to floss. Researchers are also looking into enlisting other bacteria to fight body odor. Naturally, these critters will be be applied to the underarm by means of your deodorant stick.

The beautiful thing about these things is that we won't even notice they're there. Silent multitudes of our microscopic minions will do battle for our snausages, in our pits, and in the dark moist crevices of our mouths. A fifth column of single- and sub-cellular agents will infiltrate and sabotage the work of the evil bacteria, foiling their communist plots to make us sick, smelly, and gap-toothed. Sadly, the collateral damage of this effort will eliminate the population of Mississippi.

One can only hope that this effort will succeed, and expand. Imagine the possibilities! By inducing intramural conflict amongst the bacteria and viruses of the world, we will divert the attention of those malevolent viral and bacterial armies that make our lives, well, bad. Our newly healthy, odor free, and glisteningly white lives will of course come at the cost of uncounted trillions of deaths. But when has that stopped us before?

Scientists are once again contemplating the de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. We last saw our friends the mammoths at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, when we exterminated them with fire and spear. Over the last 10,000 years, our technology has advanced somewhat, and our researchers have determined that the sperm in mammoths buried beneath the ice can, possibly, be used to bring the dead mammoth back to life. Using all the trickery and cunning evolved on the plains of ancient Africa, and refined through thousands of years of cutthroat competition, and further refined by half a millenium of science, we can now suck the mammoth junk from the frozen nads of dead mammoths, and inject them into the eggs of Asian Elephants. After enough tries, it is hoped that this will result in a fertilized mammoth/elephant chimera.

Sperm expert Narumi Ogonuki of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research Bioresource Centre in Tsukuba, central Japan, has demonstrated that sperm better survives freezing if contained in its natural packaging, than all by itself. Sperm taken from whole mouse bodies that had been frozen 15 years earlier was still capable of fertilising mouse eggs and producing pups. This demonstrates, at least in principle, that mammalian sperm can survive in a body that has been frozen for several years. And that led the eggheads to the belief that sperm could survive for much longer periods, for example in millions of years dead mammoths frozen in the arctic permafrost.

When the egg is implanted into a willing and motherly female elephant (the asian elephant is believed to be a close genetic cousin to the deceased mammoths) we wait a year and a half and BANG! we've got a cute baby mammoth. Well, a bastard red-haired half mammoth. By repeating this process, and with some careful animal husbandry, we could over time breed the half mammoths into something resembling pure bred mammoths. The Ministry fully supports the efforts to bring the dead to life. Not, you know, in a creepy undead zombie way. But through clean, wholesome science. We owe it to the animals that we killed to ensure that at least some of their genes survive into the future not just as frozen sperm in a ice-buried testicle, but as living, breathing, tasty mammals.

Further, we feel certain that when the robots come, the desperate remnant of humanity left after the initial onslaught of cybernetic death will be driven to the remote places of the earth. These places are often very, very cold. Reborn woolly mammoths will make excellent cavalry in the cold wastes of the north, and, in a pinch, very large meals.

Scientists have recently (this millennia) come to the conclusion that large rogue waves do, in fact exist.

Over the centuries, many accounts have told of monster waves that battered and sank ships. In 1933 in the North Pacific, the Navy oiler Ramapo encountered a huge wave. The crew, calm enough to triangulate from the ship’s superstructure, estimated its height at 112 feet.

In 1966, the Italian cruise ship Michelangelo was steaming toward New York when a giant wave tore a hole in its superstructure, smashed heavy glass 80 feet above the waterline, and killed a crewman and two passengers. In 1978, the München, a German barge carrier, sank in the Atlantic. Surviving bits of twisted wreckage suggested that it surrendered to a wave of great force.

Despite such accounts, many oceanographers were skeptical. The human imagination tended to embellish, they said.

Moreover, bobbing ships were terrible reference points for trying to determine the size of onrushing objects with any kind of accuracy. Their mathematical models predicted that giant waves were statistical improbabilities that should arise once every 10,000 years or so.

That began to change on New Year’s Day in 1995, when a rock-steady oil platform in the North Sea produced what was considered the first hard evidence of a rogue wave. The platform bore a laser designed to measure wave height. During a furious storm, it registered an 84-foot giant.

Then, in February 2000, a British oceanographic research vessel fighting its way through a gale west of Scotland measured titans of up to 95 feet, “the largest waves ever recorded by scientific instruments,” seven researchers wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

It's an interesting article in its own right, but I was struck by the similarity to the scientific establishment's resistance to the idea that rocks might fall from the skies. The words meteorology and meteorite describe the study of weather and extraplanetary debris falling to earth. The reason the names are so similar is that scientists refused to believe, for decades and despite the evidence, that the rocks that fell were anything but atmospheric phenomena.

How will we get to the singularity with such stubborn researchers? And indeed, one might ask, "Why do they hate the rogue waves' freedom? Sailors have been reporting these waves for centuries. But oceanographers told them, "Silly seamen, our models say that a wave like you describe could only happen once in ten thousand years. And you already reported one. So you must be lying. Your ship must have sank due to pilot error." The power of what you know you know is for most people inescapable. Like an overactive spam filter, we reject those parts of reality that fail to match our model of reality. Truly, acceptance of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. Hey, maybe we don't know everything about oceans. What if - just sayin, now, what if there really were big honking waves? Five years later, you've got the beginnings of a warning system and a deeper understanding.

Thought this was cool - a new observatory in Germany hopes its new apparatus will detect gravitational waves. The GEO 600 gravitational wave detector in Hanover is now in continuous observation mode, and scientists hope that their gizmo will in the near future detect the teeny, tiny ripples in the spacetime continuum caused by the passing of a gravitational wave. These gravitational waves are created when supermassive objects like black holes or large stars do something freaky like explode. Current theory holds that all mass can create gravitational waves, like when I shake my hips, but the gravitational force is so weak compared to the other forces that only the largest objects doing the most violent things will create gravitational waves that might be detected here on Earth. For an idea of the relative strengths of the primary forces, consider that you are held more or less firmly to the earth by gravity. The mass of the Earth is considerable - 5.9742 × 1024 kilograms. Yet despite all that mass pulling down, a moderately strong magnet on a crane will lift a multiton car easily. The chemical bonding forces of superglue will also easily support a midget from an I-beam, as we all remember from the commercials. If the force of gravity is taken to be 1, then the weak nuculer force is 10²⁵, the electromagnetic force is 10³⁶, and the strong nuculer force is 10³⁸. (This assumes that the universe follows the modern physics model. This interpretation would be tragically mistaken if it turned out that the theories of Intelligent Falling were in fact a better description of underlying reality.)

GEO 600 is working alongside a US project known as Ligo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory). It may also be joined in the hunt by an Italian lab within a year. A simultaneous gravity wave detection at these facilities would be a major milestone - both a confirmation of existing theory and the beginning of a whole new field of astronomy.

Laser interferometers are looking for disturbances in their experimental set-ups that are equivalent to mere fractions of the diameter of a proton, one of the particles that make up the nucleus of an atom. Getting GEO 600 to approach this level of sensitivity has been an immense challenge.

"There's more to come from GEO 600; I think we're still about a factor of three away from the design sensitivity over part of the frequency range. But the sensitivity we have makes it very worthwhile stopping improvement to run for an extended period," said Professor Jim Hough, from the Institute for Gravitational Research at Glasgow University, UK. Achieving the necessary sensitivity has been a huge challenge: "I think the most likely event for us to detect at the moment are coalescing black holes. I'm extremely confident," he told BBC News. A detection would be a final test of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Pretty cool stuff.

Everything, it seems, moves faster in this internet age. Yesterday, I had the flu. For four hours. At six in the evening, I was right as rain. Wrapping up a day at the home office and center for world domination, and getting ready to prepare dinner for the buckethead gens. Then, at first so subtle I wasn't sure I felt it at all, body aches. I said to Mrs. Buckethead, "I think I'm coming down with the flu." She stepped two paces back in a heartwarming show of concern. I began to gather ingredients for dinner. I managed to grab the milk and of a sudden I could barely walk for the pain from all my muscles cramping up at once. I decided to forego dinner.

My son, frustrated by my simultaneous presence and inability to play with him, insisted that now that work was over, I need to go downstairs and play for a little bit. He hasn't learned to play the "You promised!" card, but its essence was heavily implied in his pleading tone. I shuffled downstairs, and very slowly laid down on the floor. It was now about quarter after six. I made a sincere but quite frankly ineffectual attempt to play with the boy. My feeble efforts were hampered by the fact that it is hard to handle small toys when your whole arm is shaking. I was shivering almost uncontrollably. I asked John to go upstairs and get another blanket. This helped not at all, but provided some moral comfort. The boy looked at me, and said in his most serious tone, "You need medicine."

I went upstairs, and collapsed on the couch. I piled three blankets and my banky atop my quivering body and tried to be stoic. From a distance I must have looked like a pile of vibrators set on "Insane" with dirty laundry thrown on top. It was now close to seven. Mrs. Buckethead felt my forehead and reported with her usual precision, "You're hot." I said, "I know, but do I have a fever?"

Then, I got delerious. I have vague memories of disturbing dreams involving police cars, dinosaurs, and Mike Rowe from the show Dirty Jobs trying to kill me with a baby seal. My wife reports that for the next two hours I lay there vibrating, periodically making terrible hacking noises and occasionally sneezing. Then, I passed out.

I woke up at about nine, feeling like I'd been beaten with the lead hangover pipe. I drank a pint of juice, a large tumbler of ice water, and brushed my teeth. I stared, uncomprehending, at the TV. By ten, I felt tired but normal. Well, as normal as I ever feel.

A complete course of the flu, painful and real, presenting all the symptoms in the normal order, in almost exactly four hours. Before I passed out, I managed to worry just a little about the bird flu. I remember reading stories of the 1918 pandemic where healthy people got on the train and died before making it home. I guess this wasn't that. But one of the weirder illnesses I've had. All in all, a convenient sickness that let me get in a days work, get sick, and still be ready for work the next morning. Unlike the lingering grippe suffered by my compatriot Johno. But wierd all the same.

"Males are little flying sperm missiles."

While some may argue the general applicability of this statement, it in fact comes from an article about the pervasiveness and sheer bulk of the world's ant population.

Via unfogged, I give you the number one reason I'm thankful not to have been born a female hyena: "imagine giving birth through a penis."

Wait'll you read the part about the fatal tearing.

It turns out that the old chestnut about keeping your eye on the ball is not the best advice. And standing under a pop fly is not the optimal solution for catching it. Some eggheads have analysed the matter, and discovered that it is frankly impossible to keep your eye on the ball - when it gets to within a couple yards of the plate, the baseball's angular motion is to fast for anyone's eye - even those of a major league hitter - to track. What really happens is that they follow the ball until that point, and then jump to the place where they expect the ball to cross the plate.

And in that short distance, magic happens. A well thrown curve ball can drop as much as a foot in that short distance, which is why even major league hitters miss most of the time. And the reason people think that there is such a thing as a rising fast ball is that if you think you're facing an 80 mile fastball, you will expect the ball to drop as it nears the plate. If it is in fact a ninety mile fastball, its velocity will ensure that it doesn't drop nearly so much, creating the illusion of rising over the plate.

A fascinating article, and well worth a read.

[wik] The Maximum Leader is quick to note that there is a whole book of eggheads poking at baseball, called, "The Physics of Baseball (3rd Edition)". I haven't read it, but the Ol' Maximum Leader is a sharp guy, so go buy the book, already.

I had the day off from work today. It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the sixties. I was not able to enjoy it. I have discovered a new malady, whose physical symtoms present and uncanny resemblence to having ingested a few ounces of molten lead and and being repeatedly punched in the nuts by Mike Tyson over a period of hours. Not to venture too far into the realm of oversharing, there was blood where there is not supposed to be blood. I feel mildy better now, as witness my ability to sit at a computer for long enough to type this.

I shall name this disease Dick Cheney Syndrome, because Dick Cheney's thumb-fingered gun handling and media reticence is all the pinheaded lackwits on the news were talking about whilst I lay curled in a fetal position praying that God would tell Mike Tyson to cut it out with the nutpunching, already.

I would have named it Senator Reid Syndrome, because he pissed me off with some sadly typical asinine remarks. But no one will ever say, "Sen. Reid never goes hunting. He goes killing."