Bat in Motion

via this Discover magazine blog post.  Bats are so gorgeous in flight.  But quite odd on the ground - my favorite, the running vampire bat.

Vampire running! from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

How to kill a nocturnal mockingbird

Kept up by a courting song of a bachelor mockingbird.

The odd birds that are up at 1am turned out not to be birds at all.  The lone voice and the odd collection of calls could only come from one.  Sources say that he will get over night singing once he's found a mate.  Actually killing the bird appears to be illegal, due to a 1918 law (but feel free to dispose of the cute singing European Starlings).  To get rid of the noise of a nocturnal singing mockingbird, one tourist noted online that they used a loud bluejay call and laptop speakers.  But he isn't so bad.

He's back at it again now.  Not bad background for coffee and pie.

Perhaps, though, he's drawn too much from the spare night environment that has more people noises than bird noises.  One piece sounds just like a kitten, but probably isn't.  Another is definitely a cricket.  Also, I'm pretty sure that he frequently repeats his version of a car alarm.  A few other pieces sound like car unlocking beeps, a sci-fi ray gun, and what seems to me like the turning system screech of a car that needs maintenance.  I can't identify the noise of a car starting, but I feel like it should be there.

Wikipedia tells me that Darwin originally expressed doubts about the immutability of species while considering the variations in Mockingbirds he saw in South America and the Galapogos.  The Mockingbird came before his finches.

updating things

as usual, posts are not fixed once posted. when i get into a time-wasting mode, i edit edit edit. so recent stuff likely changed a bit, hopefully in a good direction. but often just with the addition of extraneous links.

listening to: the Große Fuge (man, I wish I felt like this sometimes; well maybe not that cheesy), Godowsky etudes, and the Well-Tempered Clavier Book II (Fisher).

Bacon - it embetters your vittles!

Bacon: the modern elixir (that is if your religion or political party doesn't forbid pork).

Here's a recipe that shows that bacon fat can make potatoes tastier. This can be seen as a proof of principle; others have likely extended this bacon-fat improvement into many varied foodstuff recipes.

This reminds me that i never partook in the purchasing of chocolate mit bacon at wholefoods while at UCLA. Others said it was tasty... a project for tomorrow's shopping, I think.

did anyone else know they can get an amphetamine patch?

It's called Daytrana, a patch version of Ritalin aka methylphenidate. This is sortof crazy, but it does seem a natural extension from a nicotine patch to a meth one.

This smart patch is targeted at children, naturally, who don't like to eat pills*. You can read about Daytrana on Wikipedia. In great wiki-flack form, the entry closes by noting that "Daytrana continues this progression toward greater abuse resistance by providing a non-oral, non-granulated package that can be removed at will." Of course this is a huge advance. If you feel addiction creeping up on you, just pull the patch right off.

Daytrana - a "Methylphenidate Transdermal System" (MTS) - was first known as MethyPatch. I wonder why that didn't make it through PR? (mother to ADHD child: "Here Tommy, come and get a new MethyPatch for your arm to replace that old spent smart sticker.")

But I probably don't know how useful this product could be. Helpfully, Shire pharma provides parents' accounts of drug effectiveness. I like the one about Jimmy, with the funny anecdote about the time Jimmy stuck his smart sticker in the cat's ear "to make Fluffy a genius". Just kidding.** Although I'm pretty sure there have been cases where the child receiving treatment shared the patch with a friend.

Anyway, don't forget to sign up for your free 30-day Daytrana trial. Watch out for recalls, as in 2008 some lots were pulled from the market because it seems that the sticker backing was hard to pull off. No reported ODs, so no biggie.

Seriously, though, no one really knows the costs of medicating very young children with strong dopaminergic drugs. I would bet that their brains do not develop normally, although that may not be a bad thing. There's lots of research left to do here, and also on adult ADHD, which isn't even easily DSMIV-diagnosable (not to say that I endorse the DSMIV).

* I never liked taking pills as a kid, either. For a long time I used to mush any pills I needed to take into refried beans. How that made the them easier to ingest, I have no idea. I still have a vivid memory of these cheap canned beans with chalky pills. You can bet that my memoir will begin with me sitting in a old-folks home, eating my mush of beans and pills, and suddenly I'll be pulled back the world of my childhood...

** Don't sue me for libel! This example NOT taken from an actual personal account.

my t-shirts, post #1

Lets start a new series on my numerous self-designed t-shirts* with the one that I wore today.

I didn't come up with the text myself. Berkeley restrooms, on campus or in coffee shops (a moment of silence for the late Wall Berlin), were full of crazy rantings and a few coherent ones (and crazy responses to the coherent ones, etc). In my opinion, nothing tops the spare graffiti in the Moses, the home of the Philosophy department - it's probably written by crazy people actually on their way to Ph.D.s. The tshirt text was scrawled by the urinal in the upper floor men's room in the Philosophy building at UC Berkeley. Years later I have finally memorialized it in print, after testing out the idea in numerous bar conversation. I've no idea if the writing is still there today.

Perusing the world's restrooms, you might see Nietzsche's "God is dead" written here and there - or whatever the local translation of "Gott ist tot" may be. Everyone loves that bit of old Friedrich. And sometimes this will be followed by the bland addition, "Nitzsche is dead (God)."*

The Berkeley version, however, with it's delicious taboo-breaking and associated smells and taste, is incomparable.

God is dead

Necrophiliacs rejoice

When I walk down the street with this on, I often feel like people are ogling my breasts, but then I remember what I'm wearing. Though I'm betting that half the population doesn't know what necrophilia is (make that half the population of New York. Back home in Nebraska, perhaps 90%). Back in Berkeley this spring, I wore this shirt during my sprint from eating to more eating, a girl working at Gregoire said that it had made her day. That was pretty sweet. Also, a professor I work with appreciatively(?) said the shirt was "disgusting."

* only LA hipsters were harmed in the creation of this fitted t-shirt. Printed via CafePress - I think this is the link to my correct storefront (cafepress is down right now).

** it is a good question but perhaps beyond the realm of science to test whether Nietzsche is not dead, but just suffering a nightmare of eternal recurrence. Perhaps he's stuck somewhere between here and Mars?

The mango nectarine

I miss California's cornucopia of fruit oh so much.  But this summer the grocery store on my block - which has almost everything except really diverse produce (they haven't had tangelos for months until last week!) - threw in a few sweet gems that I had never heard of before.

The best so far has been the mango nectarine.  These yellow-green fruits first appeared at $6.99/lb, though, so I definitely avoided them.  Until late one night when I came off the 1 still a bit buzzed.  Even the cashier commented on how expensive the fruit was.  I took my conquest - just one! - immediately to my room.  

This was one of the most luscious, delicious fruits that I have ever had.  Calling it "mango" probably accounted for half of the flavors I thought I detected (placebo flavors), but no matter.  The texture was not like a nectarine, but more like a non-stringy Nam Doc mango - with edible flesh!  I actually kept the fruit's sticker - like this one - stuck to the inside of my wallet as some kind of reminder (I forget names really easily).

I've read that mango nectarines bruise easily, don't preserve very long, and only have a short season, all of which probably accounts for their rarity.  And they seem pretty variable (not unlike most other fruits, pitted or otherwise), as a month later the store had them for only $2.99/lb.  I jumped on this and got a few, but they were more bruised, less flavorful, and a bit stringy.  I'm still hooked from the first one I had, though, so next time they arrive, I'll definitely put out three bucks for another amazing yellow-green half pound.

convention colors

While the last night of the convention was grand because of the speeches, I wasn't in much of a mood to be affected by them or get misty (I can usually get choked up over anything.).  Perhaps a bad mix of beer and caffeine and a so-so experience at a piano recital at Le Poisson Rouge was to blame.  

Anyway.  What really caught my attention Thursday night was the horrible mix of a yellow-orange lit grid facade behind Obama and his skin color.  Imagining the clips of the speech playing later with this anti-designed combination made me cringe.  What about a cool blue?  or pink?  I head that the dems had to get some generic convention planners to throw this together because the primary fight didn't leave much time, but I still assumed that the Obama campaign was omniscient and omnipotent.  Alas.

You can see the faux windows/doors below, but luckily, the nyu at least, in the post-speech front-page slideshow, was also conscious of the problem and avoided any ugly clashing shots.

The savior of the night was the divine use of fucsia.  In Obama's black-striped tie, in Michelle's gorgeous print dress, and in the girls' dresses - especially the little one.  This perceptual harmony just made up for the clashing stage tones.  When they cut to the younger daughter dancing around during the speech in bright pink and fucsia, it put a smile on my face.

It helps that my brain is probably 10% devoted to processing this color, with direct wiring into my dopamine system (this also fuels my growing all-beet diet).  But perhaps subliminally this combination could push a few aesthetic focused Hillary supports back more strongly into the fold?

jobama.net

"Jobama's so phat, they sit on both sides of the aisle."

Enjoy the Obama-Biden site - some folks I know who have great foresight threw it together last week.  It's kindof like "Barack Obama is your new bicycle". You can also submit your own clever phrases to them via the email address on the site if you'd like to improve it.  Spread the word.

Radiohead concert review & photos

OK, I need to get to sleep, so this isn't a review, but here are links to the Radiohead 8/8/8/ concert photos and videos (the date reminds me - I still have not watched the opening ceremonies!)

Photo album I: Ferry, Rainbows, Waterfalls, and All Points West evening photos.

Photos album II: Radiohead concert photos, stills all taken from the Youtube videos - though one of the best from the show, Reckoner, is all crappy and blank (and lower quality than the rest) because I was dancing. Check out people's videos, though, because the lights are mesmerizing.