Two Dishes But To One Table

Whither Flipper?

I realized recently that the animals most cherished by the collective public are not the same from era to era. As Peter points out in the comments below, this could be linked to the society itself: what it values and how it thinks. There's a small sociology research paper lurking in here somewhere. Any sociologists out there need a theory to hang a thesis on? Just footnote me! I was just doing it for fun but I'd enjoy seeing anyone take this ball and work it up properly...

decade	Era-specific Charismatic Megafauna	Defining charactaristic
70s	Dolphin, whale	intelligence
80s	unicorn*	combable-mane / pink
70s	Baby seal	White fur, big eyes
2000s	lemurs	Wild striped tail, glowing eyes, odd dancing gait (see You Tube for confirmation)
1990s	Sea turtle	motherhood
1980s	orcas	Theme park servitude
1990s	Polar bear	Soda-appetite
2000s	Polar bear	CO2 poster child vainly seeking an ice floe
1970s	Sea horses	Bizarre, affordable (~$9) as home pets.
<1940s	bee	Work ethic
1970s	bee	Venomous & irritable
2000s	bee	sustainable farming
1990s	ladybug	Sustainable farming
1990s	deer	Presence anticipates Captain Planet arrival
1970s	shark	Revenge of the Earth against hubris of 70s humans
1970s	bear	Early adopter of the move West (esp to Colorado)
1980s	wolf	Friends with Kevin Costner and other Native Americans
1960s	otter	Oblivious to the rat race; thriving without a work ethic

Can I Keep a Compost Bin In An Apartment?

Composting works, even in a third floor, Manhattan apartment. Here is the expereince from 10 months of worm-wrangling in an apartment compost bin.   FAQ's:

Do they smell? They smell as clean as pristine Wisconson dirt in a fresh-plowed field.

Do they eat everything? No, they are really slow with corncobs taking several weeks, even if diced up-- not surprising since all they have are lips, an intestine, and a sandy gizzard. Fruit attracts fruit flies and harbors fruit flies so we add it after freezing it. Here is one of the big successes: a plastic beer cup that was labeled 'compostable'. I was skeptical about this apparently styrene cup. Even after a month it looked brand new. But somehow in the third month, this compostable plastic turned into a slimy scumbag (see below) and I presume it dissolved soonafter.

Do the worms try to get out? Not to scare you but, on four different occasions we have seen a dozen worms make a break for it. They were halted by the lid. We think they were protesting too much moisture. When we leave the lid off they don't try to escape.

How do you scoop out the rich black dirt but leave behind the living worms? The worms flee light so you scoop out the dirt onto newspaper, wait 15 minutes, take the top inch or two of dirt, repeat. Eventually, you get all the dirt and the newspaper is 100% worms, terrified, huddling in little clusters, at which point you toss the worms back into the compost bin. (see piles of worms, below, fleeing the light at dirt harvest time).

  (plastic bin is in the background, separating worms from the compost based on photo-phobia, in the foreground)

Is the food in an apartment compost bin rotted? No, it is eaten by the worms and their bacteria. Very little slimy mold or rotting seems to occur. Maybe it is like yogurt, with the good decomposers crowding out the objectionable, smelly ones.

Can you stock a composter with “worms” from outdoors? If you mean earthworms no. Bloodworms (Red Wigglers!) work well for us, bought from a non-profit urban composting table set up at a farmer's market in the city.

(here's the biodegradeable cup in closeup and the worms in closeup )

Towards a Theory of Everything

I liked the last part of this:
"If spin states in quantum computing turn out to have 4 possible states it would be kind of like how DNA comes in 4 types of bases...I want to them to prove that humans are just computers and that introns are commented-out lines of code".  
                         --Vincent, this morning, at my lab.

(Possibly helpful definition of "commented-out".)

A Shoutout to Vesta

There was a “star” shining in my eyes this morning. I was lying in bed, one eye open just enough to spot it through the screen. By the time I got my telescope out, the sun had risen and obliterated it, but I checked the charts and my “star” was Saturn.

The chart said that you can see the brightest asteroid (asteroid, not meteor) this week, Ceres. Who knew they were observable ! “Easily spottable with binoculars” says Sky & Telescope's Sky at a Glance.

That led me to John Beadreau's awesome photos of planets and other things.. He's using a pretty big telescope and all the photo/filter technology available and getting photos that I thought weren't possible from home, or even from the ground:

Check out 7 moons visible in a single shot here:

  Imaged with a monochrome CCD-modified Philips ToUcam Pro webcam @ f/7 through a TEC140 APO Refractor. North is up.

Fraternal Greeting Too Short at My Church

There is a part of a Christian church service when the peace is supposed to be “passed”. In my current parish, Grace Church NYC, this is done in a pretty muted fashion. I timed it before and it takes about 15 seconds, which probably allows most people to pass the peace to 2 people, maybe 3, tops. I regret this brevity. Tilting toward the other end of the spectrum, I found mention of a longer version in a book about the history of church gestures.

Originally (the passing of the peace) meant a kiss...This kiss was however given in a very precise and stylized way. The person giving the peace placed his or her hands under the arms of the person receiving it, leaned his or her head to the left and kissed the right cheek of the person receiving the peace, saying, “The peace of the Lord be always with you.” ... (medieval Christians, uncomfortable with this intimacy) invented the pax-brede, a disk of metal which was passed around and kissed...we are closer to the original idea when we clasp hands gut this needs special understanding. The tone is not “Hi, how are you?” but an expression of desire to be one in Christ, forgiving and forgetting any faults and wrongs.

This is from Lundy Pentz's Body Language, a little book, the kind that you pick up for a 50 cent honor system donation at the back of the church. Pentz is a biology professor. I was surprised to find her book was displayed in full at Google Books.

21 Years Since Barry Gordy Sold the Label

I was trying to find an article about Michael Jackson and instead, ran across an interesting report about the retention of black ownership and loss of black ownership in large black-owned companies. It listed some landmark purchases in recent years:

BET black entertainment tv	2000	sold to: viacom
Essence / Ebony magazine	2005	Time-Warner
Phat Farm / Baby Phat	2004	Kellwood (Liz Claiborne, Calvin Klein women's sportsear)
Motown Records	1988	MCA / Universal Music
Soft Sheen Haircare	2000	L'Oreal
Ultra Sheen cosmetics	1998	Wella AG

The authors interviewed the owners of The Charlotte Bobcats and also Black Enterprise magazine who are trying to groom a line of succesors to ensure that the companies they founded will remain in the family in some sense.

If you are searching for a black-owned business you might try the search window at The 100s, a list maintained by Black Enterprise Magazine, which unlike Essence, is black owned still.

Calesthenics

Not really useful to anyone but me, but I find it handy to have a workout routine that I can get access to when I am not at home, by looking here at my website. So here I will archive my exercises, almost all taken from the Annette Lang book mentioned previously.

WARM UP

• lifted toe tap 10x
• standing press (2 barbells, 10# each) 25x
• seated rotation 10x
• plank 20 sec
• lateral hold on hand 20 sec each side
• back extend 5 x 10 sec
• opposite arm reach 3x each side, ten count using pennies
• pushups

WORKOUT

• reverse crunch (10x) counted 8-2,4,6 8... 9-2,4,6,8... *body forms U shape*
• cable to doorway standing rotation turn 20x each side
• standing press 25x
• opp arm reach 10sec 10x each side, really go for linear pointer-dog form
• plank 60 sec
• lateral hold on elbow 20 sec
• *seated rotation with dumbell
• dancer diagonal situps 15x
• supine rotation 15x go slowly
• back extension 15x, 10 sec, use pennies to count
• rowing with cable to doorway 40x

which is a chicken's closest relative?

I just spent 45 minutes digging at The National Center for Biotechnology Information getting DNA sequences for all kinds of organisms.  You may enjoy some of the results. Try your hand at these three questions on phylogeny:

1. Which is a rat's closest relative, humans or chickens?
2. Which is a human's closest relative, rats or bears?
3. Which is yeast's closest relative, rickets-bacteria or a chicken?

(It would be fun if you could submit your guesses as a "comment"! Then scroll down a couple posts for the answers...)

And then, if so inclined, (that's a big if) you can make family trees to show who is related to whom.  Here are the steps:

• If you know some gene names from biology class, get the name of a gene that is so basic to cell-chemistry that most living things have it.  I chose cytochrome c oxidase, subunit 3 (aka 'cox3').
• Enter it in various search windows at NCBI, along with organism names in the same window.  (for example, search myoglobin whale or search hox1 human)  Especially useful is the gene search button.
• Save the protein sequences from each animal.
• Feed this text file to an alignment program like CLUSTALW.
• Feed the results of that into a distance calculator, like Phylip.

Admittedly the last two steps are hard to do the first time, but if you are sort of biology-oriented , the first step above can make for some fun surfing I think.  The database has extremely exotic organisms, including a small amount of neandertal mitochondria DNA.

Password Idea

Maiden names and first pets are not sufficiently secure against "dictionary searching" by hackers.   My new idea is, when prompted to set a hint answer at a web site registrar, I am going to set the answer to a phone number from my past.   It will be sort of a non-sequitur to claim I had a pet named 555-1212...

To add to the password paranoia, here is a link about how to guess someone's s.s. #.

Review of Merce Cunningham Dance Company at R2R

Review of Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the River To River Festival in Rockefeller Park (August 1 & 2, 2009)
(Battery Park City, behind Stuyvessant High School)

MCDC gave a free, very intimate OUTDOOR performance this weekend .
They set up two raised stages in the grass, about 100 feet apart, and performed a dozen or so dances from
their repertory. 

Set list, with times (note the two unrelated programs in column A and B for the near and far stages):

  The 4 channel sound system was really excellent --
very dramatic, crisp, clear ambient sounds, ala 2nd wave John Cage, done by
I loved some of the later pieces in the set, especially the duets.  Also amazing were the solos by Rashaun Mitchell
and Andrea Weber. 

The audience had some very serious long time fans.  Almost no children were there, although the ones that were seemed to respond emotionally to the movement on stage.  A 3 year old near me was definitely shaking a
tail feather so hard that it annoyed one older fan and the dad had to sort of restrain the kid.

People were wearing hats and shirts with Cunningham's name on it, so they were definitely knowledgeable and loyal.  It was even more of a diehard audience than the ones that line up for Fall for Dance (the well attended ten dollar a seat event that, intended as a popularizing introduction to dance is, ironically, so hard to get tickets too, that only insiders tend to go).

Usually I sit really far from these things.  The view from the cheap seats emphasizes choreography and sound
but at Saturday's performance, I was in the front row , sitting on a picnic blanket in the grass, and was so overwhelmed by the presence of the dancers and their physicality that I was distracted from the dance.  It was like getting good seats at the US Open and seeing crushing tennis serves from a frighteningly close distance. 

The best seats would have been on the New Jersey side of the lawn so that you could sit
with your back to the sun and see both stages at once. 

The style of dance was un-visceral and unfunky.  MCDC does not "swing" in any sense, and I can see how  they were the perfect troupe to do site-specific dances for various galleries in the Dia:Beacon recently (2007 - 2009).

Seeing snippets of MCDC, with no overall arc or buildup to the action, was a little tiring.  There's a James Joyce/Ullyses feel to the stream of randomness, both random sound and random movement.  It's pretty demanding for the viewer.  If MCDC were an oil painting I would hang it near Cy Twombly and Piet Mondrian. Not having much to compare it to, I'm going to say I liked Saturday's potluck program a lot more than when they danced Radiohead/Sigur Ros at BAM and liked it a lot less than when they danced Ocean at Lincoln Center Rose Room.

The pale indoor aclimated dancers survived full sun-exposure -- just barely.  
The sun was hot on audience and performers alike, illuminating them dramatically.

It was interesting to see some of the dancers smile while dancing but that they do not as a rule smile, in contrast to the ballet where it is sort of a given that the dancer will smile through much of the dance.

Afterwards the dancers all changed into less-revealing garb and came to hang out on the lawn with anybody who was still around.  That was an added bonus.

Also, with his death this week, the dance functioned as a public wake and celebration of Cunningham's work.  It's still a sad week and one member of the company made a very short announcement at the end, thanking everyone for marking the occasion of his passing.

Inserted in the program:

BTW, if you are a Tom Otterness fan, there is a MAJOR collection of his sculptures in this park -- as big an assortment as the ones installed throughout the Eighth Avenue L Train subway Terminal and even more thematically cohesive.
Between seeing the sculptures and the dance, we felt really lucky.