“For in and out, above, about, below, ‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun, Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.” — The Rubâiyât of Omar Khayyâm We have been raised to believe in a concrete reality defined by matter, which is something that occupies space, and is either perceived by our sensory organs, or measured by other tools [1]. As beings with a physical dimension, we humans tend to think of our “selves” as unified “wholes”. Of course, our everyday lives and activities pose little threat to this perception: the…
The Science Creative Quarterly
From October, 2006
FIBONACCI POEMS
(For more information about the Fibonacci numbers, please click here) Shyness Fish dive deeply, mouths agape, fins proud and ragged, filtering the oceans apart until shimmer-hooked and then flopping in boat bottoms, when gills heave, gasp, drowning in air; eyes glaze like dropped marbles, clouded and cracked, but holding. Ego She will nod as you pass her and you both will know you are young and raw, half-bitten, spitten in disgust like fruit picked before its season. Heaven Dead leaves jump back on the trees, a reverse whirlwind and an impossible sunset seeking their origins, the life from whence they…
SUMAN
Dirty scents excited her, the dirtier the better. When Alice announced this to the group of sense-photographers at the meeting for the new sensate advertising campaign, they all laughed. Who could have predicted that dirty things would bring in wealth? One of the men opened an illicit capsule of blue seal cigarette scent, and knuckles cracked audibly around the room, as the men shifted in their seats, remembering the gestures of smoking, the peculiar choreography of hand to mouth arguments over lay-outs, collaterals. Half a lifetime ago, the room would have been swathed in actual tobacco smoke. As the people…
A Game Theoretic Approach to the Toilet Seat Problem
– FROM THE ARCHIVES – The toilet seat problem has been the subject of much controversey. In this paper we consider a simplified model of the toilet seat problem. We shall show that for this model there is an inherent conflict of interest which can be resolved by a equity solution. Consider a bathroom with one omnipurpose toilet (also known as a WC) which is used for two toilet operations which we shall designate as #1 and #2. The toilet has an attachment which we shall refer to as the seat (but see remark 1 below) which may be in…
MORE ASTRONOMICAL DEMOTIONS
The sun is now called Macaca. The moon is referred to as The Infidel. The stars are to be known as Downtown Phoenix. The Big Bang is newly christened The Ring-a-Ding. The Milky Way is now the Skid Mark. The remaining planets collectively are renamed the G8. Please refer to planet Earth as 2Warm 4Al .
JOURNAL CLUB FIND: SEXUAL ORIENTATION? LET’S LOOK AT YOUR FINGERS.
(Click on reference to see pdf of first page) REFERENCE: Finger-length ratios and sexual orientation. (2000) Nature 404: pp455-456 FIRST PARAGRAPH: Animal models have indicated that androgenic steroids acting before birth might influence the sexual orientation of adult humans. Here we examine the androgen-sensitive pattern of finger lengths, and find evidence that homosexual women are exposed to more prenatal androgen than heterosexual women are; also, men with more than one older brother, who are more likely than first-born males to be homosexual in adulthood, are exposed to more prenatal androgen than eldest sons. Prenatal androgens may therefore influence adult human…
GENE CLASSES FOLLOW DIFFERENT FATES AFTER PLANT GENOME DUPLICATION
Any student who has lost hours of work to a computer crash knows the value of backing up important files. Yet long before the first distraught student uttered shrieks of dismay at disappearing data, plants were saving an extra copy of certain genes—or so say Brad Chapman and his colleagues in a recent paper that offers a fresh look at what happens to duplicated genes when polyploids are formed. A polyploid is the result of genome duplication (Bowers et al. 2003), which may occur when errors during meiosis produce aberrant gametes with 2N rather than 1N chromosomes. Although genome duplication…
LUCY’S BONES FROM AFAR
Gracile Australopithecus: November 1974 Offered in atonement these few small bones meant nothing but salvation: a kind of anthropological grace held in a trembling hand. Mired in a bed of river dust pillowed between rocks and sheets of clay ancestral arthropods led us on. Before the fire we danced and drank and repeated the music each rote word a triumph in our mind each note ingrained. Under the brilliant carpet of heaven deep in the musk of canvas sweat and kerosene we leaped with the flame our shadows racing home our footprints close behind.
INTRODUCING OUR “FILTER”
“FILTER” The name says it all really. The Science Creative Quarterly is, at the heart of it all, a project aimed at getting folks to talk a little more science. And if we were to expand this further, it is to get non-science folks to play a little as well. This, we’ve been doing in a pseudo literary sort of way with the SCQ, and we hope also in a reasonably successful sort of way. But quite often, with respect to our roles as teachers and communications, we find something that let’s us talk science a little easier. And these…