Guest Post: How Our Pets Domesticated Us

By: | July 14, 2014

13408372845_b803a279b7_kOne of the most fascinating tidbits I came across while researching my new book, Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, concerns the 10,000-year-old village of Shillourokambos. Located on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, the site was once home to an early farming community whose inhabitants stored grain in stone silos and corralled livestock behind wood fences. In 2001, archaeologists digging beneath the foundation of what was once a small, circular house made a surprising discovery: a shallow grave containing the skeleton of a human, and next to it, surrounded by carved seashells, the remains of a cat.

That wasn’t the fascinating part. Archaeologists had long suspected that cats first entered human society to hunt the rodents that early farming villages attracted. What surprised me was learning that the Shillourokambians had shipped in foxes for the same purpose. And yet only cats became pets. Dogs, likewise, became treasured companions when plenty of other animals could have theoretically fit the bill. Of all the species on earth, only two have morphed from wild animal to family member. It’s a process that took thousands of years.

And yet, as we were transforming these animals, they were also transforming us. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 12, 2014

Galileo tomb

 

July 7-11, 2014

This week Richard finally lets slip what he was doing on his trip to Italy – communing with the shriveled remains of Galileo’s body parts – and Abstruse Goose sets himself a Sudoku-style plot challenge.

Craig recounts some lengthy discussions with E.O. Wilson, who reminds us that dying species don’t look like a dying individual animals. They’re young and healthy…until they’re just gone.

Michelle uses allometric scaling principles to allay her daughter’s fears of big monsters.

And finally, I present a roundup of children’s books for kids who like inventing, building and figuring out how things work.

Give Me a Heroine Who Invents

By: | July 11, 2014

rosierevereIt’s been a while since we had a roundup of children’s books. So long, in fact, that the last time we had one, I wasn’t yet interested in children’s books. Now, it’s situation critical. My town has one little bookstore, and our library is accessed through several flights of dingy staircase at the back of a mall. The nearest other public library is 482 kilometers away, and it’s even smaller.

I know we’ve found the right book when a reading of it sends my 5-year-old son straight into play or reaching for a pen to design something. Here are a few of our favourites:

Rosie Revere, Engineer, by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts

Rosie the Riveter was a feminist icon in the United States during World War II, when women took on traditionally male jobs. Our story’s heroine is her namesake and great-great-niece, who dreams of becoming a great engineer. The book celebrates experimental failure and design iteration in fantastically-illustrated, rhyming form. (Another good one by these authors: Iggy Peck, Architect) Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Sudokomic Game

By: | July 8, 2014

another_fun_game_is_comic_tac_toeOh this is just purely awful in so many ways.  Let me count them.  Its humor is dumb & puns are always in the very worst taste.  It’s bloody & I hate that.  It’s not only clever, worse, it’s close to addictive.  The mouseover apologizes, says this is the best he could do on short notice, so there’s that.

The secret title suggests that this comix-word game also works with tic-tac-toe.  Not trying it.  I have stuff to do.

___

http://abstrusegoose.com/575

The Last Word

By: | July 5, 2014

planet crash1June 30 – July 4, 2014

The bear in the trailer was bad enough. But the woodrat with the sometimes hard-as-concrete and sometimes soft-as-honey urinary deposits? Craig puts on his shower cap and starts scrubbing.

Guest poster Gabriel Popkin visits spineless creatures in Washington, D.C. Feel free to insert your own punchline here.

Erik’s wife says good riddance to the local placebo pusher. Erik bids a more ambivalent adiós.

Ann looks at the latest planetary systems and goes full CAPS-LOCK on Copernicus.

Helen comes home from a month in the desert and finds water, water everywhere. Upside: Trees! Downside: Humidity!

Coming Home From Saudi Arabia

By: | July 4, 2014

shutterstock_119734483

It was water that impressed me first when I got back to the U.S.

I spent the month of June in Saudi Arabia, teaching teenage girls about writing and science. On the van ride home from the airport the other day, I couldn’t believe the trees. I’d forgotten about trees. The highways are lined with them. My neighborhood is full of them. All these magnificent green trees, everywhere, sucking water from the ground and spewing it into the air, like sprinklers attached to massive, woody wells. And there’s humidity in the air. Already the rough, dry patches on the backs of my hands are starting to sort themselves out. And I can drink the water from the tap.

When I stepped out of the cool airport into the Saudi air on the evening of May 31, I thought I was standing by of a bus exhaust. But I looked and looked and there was no bus. That was just the air. Hot. Excessively so. And moving. Yesterday I walked past a bus here in D.C. and it felt just like that first step into Saudi Arabia. Continue reading →

Anti-Copernican Shock

By: | July 3, 2014

2012 new systems

[NOW WITH NEW VISUALIZATION:  see below]

Planets around other stars, exoplanets, have given me a long-running case of boredom – how long can you sustain OMG LOOKIT THAT PLANET HAS TWO SUNS? not long.  I keep writing about them anyway.  I do it because 1) sometimes somebody pays me to; and 2) the planets may or may not be interesting in themselves but the systems they’re in OMG THAT PLANET ISN’T GOING AROUND ITS SUN’S EQUATOR IT’S GOING OVER THE POLES! cause serious anti-Copernican shock.  That is, though we’ve learned we’re not special in the universe, OMG NOT ONLY ARE WE SPECIAL AFTER ALL WE’RE APPARENTLY THE ONLY ONE THERE IS!

NASA and the ground-based planet hunters are fixated on finding another earth but — aside from the rigors of proving habitability — all they’ve found so far is not us.  The most common exoplanets, of the thousands found so far, are bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune; they’re called super-Earths or sometimes sub-Neptunes and up to half the sun-like stars have them. Our solar system has none (0, zero) of them.  But being on an unlikely planet isn’t all that amazing.

What’s amazing is that no other solar system – more properly, planetary system – looks anything like ours.  True, the two main planet-finding techniques are best at systems with exoplanets close to their stars.  And if these techniques were looking at the solar system, they’d likely find the inner terrestrials and miss the outer giants. But never mind because the planetary systems they’re finding so far could give you a solid case of CAPS-LOCK.

Continue reading →