Sucks to be Phillip Wilcher

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Phil's a great guy, but seriously. It sucks to be him.

For those of you who don't know -- which would be most of you, I assume -- Phillip Wilcher is the legendary Fifth Wiggle. The one who left The Wiggles because he was too "serious" about his music.

Ouch, Phil.

Ouch.

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

Cats and kittens, I'm about to blow your minds.

Today I learnt that there is a subset of academia who believe that the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens, compared to other apes, is due to us having evolved from aquatic apes. That is to say (in layman's terms), there are people who believe that we are, all of us, sea monkeys.

Keep in mind that this is just a theory, of course, not absolute solid fact. There is some pretty interesting evidence to support it, too. Activate: dot point mode!

• Bipedalism is a nonsense way of going about being terrestrial! It is stupid for your back, knees and organs. In the water, however, your torso and joints are supported and you can breathe more easily.
• We are pretty hairless! You know what other mammals are pretty hairless? Rhinoceroses and elephants, and we already know that they have aquatic ancestors. Also dolphins and whales! Need I say more?
• Our babies are fat. Apparently the specific type of fat (i.e. subcutaneous) is good for insulation and streamlining in the water.
• We have descended larynxes. Only (other?) aquatic mammals and large deer have this trait.

• A bunch of stuff in our nose to stop water from getting in there.
• Glands (sebaceous glands) all over our skin to produce a magical kind of lubricant.
• Our brains require iodine (and a few other things also), which is (are) most easily obtained from seafood.
• Voluntary breath control, which allows us to hold our breath under water, and also pronounce vowels! That is why lesser apes cannot speak our holy tongue. They can't breathe properly, because evolution did them wrong.
• Vestigial webbing between our fingers. I think most of us commented on how our hands looked like duck's feet when we were kids. Or maybe I just had a bizarre childhood.

• Our spawn have waxy coatings over them. Oh those crazy spawn of ours!
• Our kidneys. Apparently they are aquakidneys.

And, last but not least:

• The mammalian diving reflex!

Dot point mode, deactivate! DYOO dyoo dyooooo...

The mammalian diving reflex lets us stay underwater for a longer amount of time by optimising our breathing systems. It's like a Game Booster for our respiration system. Seals, otters and dolphins all have pretty strong MDFs, and we also have a cheap pirated version of it! Hooray for pirate diving reflexes!

The reflex itself works by slowing our heart rate down 10-25% as soon as our face comes in to contact with water below 21 C. That's pretty impressive, body! Unfortunately, seals do it better, dropping from 125bpm to 10bpm. So. Thanks for showing us up there, seals. After that, the blood in our hands and feet stops circulating, because hey, we don't need those! If we go deep enough, eventually everything except our brain and heart is cut off. Which is kind of creepy, in my opinion, but no one cares what a crazy man on the internet has to say about these sort of things.

Obviously, this all sounds pretty good for a case for the aquatic ape hypothesis. Unfortunately, most of the evidence can be explained more easily with a less radical account of human evolution. It isn't disproven or anything, I'm just sayin' so you don't all run around declaring us all to be merman.

I find the aquatic ape hypothesis interesting from a cultural perspective too, though. What if Atlantis isn't so far from the truth after all? And mankind has had a strong affinity with sailing and everything. Even the native Hawaiians canoed to New Zealand. I also read somewhere that water was "Jesus' element", since he walked on it and turned it to wine and was himself "the fisher of men" and all that. But water is also vital to our very lives, so I guess it's not that surprising that we should find a few cultural allusions to it.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Police sniffer dogs are trained using some chemical that isn't illegal. Which isn't surprising. I wish I could remember what it was.
• People get sleepy in the early afternoon, after lunch, because it's twelve hours after our sleepiest part of sleep and our biological clocks are whacky
• 'n', apparently. I have written 'n' on my hand to remind me of something else that was fascinating that I learnt today. I have no idea what it was, though.

Pasta is Egg and Flour

Also, it's believed to have originated in China, not Italy. Ouch, Italians! I'd love to tell you more about this because it's actually pretty interesting but I have lab reports to do instead. Ouch, me!

Also Blogger is experiencing technical difficulties as a result of scheduled maintenance (or so I understand) and this has failed to post a few times now, so here's hoping that it goes up now and y'all can party harder.

Cognitive Dissonance and Crazy UFO Cults

So cognitive dissonance, eh? It's one of the most well-studied theories of psychology that pretty much says that when experiences don't match up with expectations, the human mind does some hasty rationalising and makes excuses for itself to try to improve your horribly crushed self esteem.

See, it's like a political cartoon! That's the joke. And long story short, today I learnt that I don't know how to draw anvils. You can all leave now.

Or you can stay! And I will tell you that when one certain Leon Festinger heard about one certain Dorothy's Martin's crazy UFO cult, he decided to write a study about it! This is because the crazy UFO cult (henceforth referred to as "the crazy UFO cult") believed that on the 21st of December, in the Year of Our Lord 1954, the world would end in a giant wet Cataclysm and everyone would die except for them, because their buddies the aliens would rock up at midnight and save them.

The crazy UFO cult knew that this was true because Dorothy Martin had been told so by the aliens from 'Clarion' who wrote stuff using her body as their pen. That is to say, because she wrote it down. And I'm pretty sure Clarion is in Illinois. Or Utah.

EDIT: As it turns out, it's in Illinois AND Utah! And Iowa, and Pennsylvania, and any other number of places that have placed called 'Clarion'.

Well, the crazy UFO cult was in Chicago, which is in Illinois, too, so the aliens weren't really that far away. Maybe Dot was just expecting some light rain in Chicago and thought her sister-in-law from Clarion could come pick her up, and the whole thing spiralled out of control?

Or, more likely, the crazy UFO cult was just crazy.

Anyway, Leon was all like, woah, dudes, check it out, this crazy UFO cult is crazy and also wrong, let's infiltrate it to see how badly they break down due to cognitive dissonance when they realise just how wrong they are!

So, in the interests of ethical science and totally not producing many lulz-worthy Facebook statuses for their friends, they did just that. Apparently it was quite difficult to convince the crazy UFO cult that the sadistic cognitive psychologists were genuine and not just trying to goof them, which makes sense, considering that most of the members of the crazy UFO cult were crazy and had forsaken their entire lives (given up all their worldly possessions, left jobs, uni, husbands, goldfish, wives, etc.) so that Dot's sister-in-law from Clarion could pick them up. Which precisely why Leon wanted to study (and not laugh at and publicise) their reaction to being so, so, SO wrong.

So finally, the big night arrived! All the crazy UFO cult cultists gathered on their crazy UFO cult hill ready and eager to be abducted as soon as midnight arrived.

And then midnight arrived!

And nothing happened.

So the very first rationalisation was: our watches are fast! It is only 1954 and our televisions still use cathode rays. We will wait a bit longer until midnight!

And nothing happened.

At about four o'clock in the morning, when it became clear that the crazy UFO cult could have just bloody well walked to Clarion by now, Dotty K began to cry bitter tears of being forsaken by her alien pals. Fortunately, as soon as she was done, she received another telepathic SMS from them saying that the crazy UFO cult had done SUCH a great job believing in them, that Alien-God had decided not to Cataclysm after all, jolly good, pat on the back, so go spread word about how nice I am, and that if people ever stop believing in me then they will burn in fire and also brimstone.

So at this point, reasons Leon, the crazy UFO cult cultists' cognitive dissonance is leading the reasoning in their head to go a little something like this:

Oh balderdash,

The world didn't end

And everyone thinks I'm crazy.

I'm feeling more than a little sheepish right now,

Let me tell you!

IT IS TIME TO MAKE EVERYONE THINK THE SAME THING I DO SO THEN MY CRAZINESS ISN'T CRAZY,

IT IS INSTEAD JUSTIFIED BY AN IMPARTIAL MAJORITY.

I'm going to avoid drawing any parallels between the crazy UFO cult and any classical theological positions, but I will just say that I definitely respect the beliefs of anyone who has beliefs, even if they are in a crazy UFO cult or think that psychology is an actual science.

Bam!

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• We have had six successful lunar landings, all within the Apollo program
• The first self-righting lifeboat was invented in 1851
• One can never unsee the sight of one's mother doing Zumba

Latin has Six Tenses

If you're like me -- and you're probably not, but we can ignore that for a moment -- then you already knew that Latin had a weirdiculous amount of tenses in its language. "Like, nine or something," I believe was the exact amount I specified when asked.

Well, cats and kittens, I was mistaken!

For those of you who can't speak English or have little to no interest in 'the Lat', as it is called on the streets, let me quickly explain what a tense in. Then you will understand, and therefore care!

In English, we have three tenses: Courage, Wisdom, and Power. Each one of them roughly

corresponds to the three ACTUAL tenses of the English language, that being past, present and future. Which one you decide aligns with which one is entirely at your discretion, but know that you CAN be wrong about this, and your neighbours WILL judge you for it.

In Latin, however, they have six tenses! Three are 'simple' and three are 'perfect'. All of the 'perfect' tenses are in the past. The Lat is all about the past!

That's why they're dead and no one speaks their language any more!

The first of the simple tenses is the present tense, which functions much the same as the English present tense.

e.g.
I run from velociraptors.

The second is the imperfect tense, which is one of the past tenses that conveys an actual this is or was incomplete.

e.g.

I was running from velociraptors.

The third and last of the simple tenses is the future tense, which again is roughly synonymous with the English future tense.

e.g.

I will run from velociraptors.

The fourth and first of the perfected tenses is the perfect tense, which is used for completed ('perfected') actions.

e.g.

I ran from velociraptors.

The fifth tense is the pluperfect tense, which is used to indicate that the action was completed before something else.

e.g.

I had run from velociraptors.

The sixth and last of the tenses is the future perfect tense, which is used to indicate that something will be completed in the future.

e.g.

I will have run from velociraptors.

And now you can speak the Lat! Impress your friends with your incredible vocabulary of the Lat terms. You can even tell jokes in the Lat and be the life of the party! "I was running from velociraptors I ran from velociraptors!" See who laughs and gets it and who isn't cool enough to speak dead languages!

Their neighbours will surely judge them if they don't.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Your big toe is called your hallux
• Tapirs are arguably the cutest creatures on Earth
• Crouchmas is sometimes also called 'Roodmas' by people who are, y'know, wrong

'Full Steam Ahead' is for Boats, Not Trains

Toot toot!

This is another one of those things I always just sort of suspected and assumed but didn't actually for certain know. Well, now I do!

By my reasoning and intimate knowledge of history, at some point in the past, some primitive man-ape creature discovered fire.

Several millenia passed, and finally, mankind was evolved enough to beat two sticks and a rock together to invent the miracle of the steam engine.

Naturally, it was around the same time that everyone started to dress well and the world went monochrome.

Once the steam engine was invented, it was clear what came next: applying to things that we already had. Hamburgers, zombies, and, yes, even boats, now became steam-powered. It wouldn't be for another few years until we thought to apply steam engines to new uses, and a myriad of brilliant new devices were invented: the printing press, lightsabers, and trains.

Since steamboats had such a headstart over any sort of train (the first sort of which was the steam train), it was for the steamboat that the phrase "Full steam ahead!" evolved, meaning, of course, to convert as much heat energy to mechanical energy as was possible to increase the velocity of the vessel and go as fast as one could.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The philosopher John Dewey was 92 when he died
• Osama bin Laden has been killed by American troops in Pakistan
• 'Caterpillar' is a particularly delightful word to say!

Pippa gets her own Coat of Arms

When pondering what wonderful new piece of information I would share with you all today, I decided to go for the most topical. Lest history should forget it, or Blogger mistake the date, let me note the historical significance of today, Friday the 29th of April, 2011; the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Rockin'!

Well, it's rockin' once you ignore the fact that they're twelfth cousins once removed, anyway, but fortunately for them, genetics is totally cool with that, and unless something else goes horribly, horribly awry, their babies won't have blue feet growing out of their foreheads or anything.

I guess it's interesting, really, that in England, where they do everything so properly and have such a history of making sure that things are done properly, that so many of their monarchs are inbred. Not any more, of course, and like I said, that's nothing wrong with twelfth cousins once removed -- that's a pretty distant relation -- but still. Interesting.

But because England does have this history of doing things properly, it meant, of course, that Kate Middleton had to have a coat of arms designed for her for the wedding.

That, to me, is incredibly awesome. Heraldry is designed to be forever. The entire Middleton family, for centuries to come, has just been defined by the Middleton family as it is right now, because Kate's marrying a prince. I really need to lift my game so that all my ancestors get to be defined by me. I think they'd appreciate that.

Backtracking a moment, I'd just like to emphasise that Kate had the coat of arms designed for her. That is, she has her own specific version of the coat of arms that's lozenge-shaped and with a blue ribbon that symbolises and means "Middleton spinster". Of course, Kate's getting married in... three hours, by my watch, and so she will no longer be a Middleton spinster, so the shape changes and this changes and that changes and all this special symbolic heraldic things which are cool and fascinating but too boring to go into detail here.

So what happens to this form of the coat of arms?

It now represents, solely, her younger sister Pippa.

In all honesty, I've got to say that I'm a little bit jealous of ol' Pip. She gets her own coat of arms now, and why? Because her sister is marrying a prince. It's not even the usual fuddy-duddy of inheriting it because some ancestor was a knight in the 16th century (which, by the way, he was) or whatever, but because her sister is getting married.

One day my sister will get married, too, and I fully expect our family to get its own coat of arms because of it.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Queen Juliana of the Netherlands spent a lot of time in Canada, and they loved her for it
• Glacial acetic acid smells simultaneously disgusting and delicious (think: the strongest vinegar in the world)
• The first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was called the USS Enterprise

Also, for those who were wondering, the specific "spinster" version of the Middleton arms won't die out (necessarily) with Pippa, since Kate and Pippa also have a brother whose daughters would get it. More you know!