Why The Year Is Messed Up

January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December.

Notice: September, October, November, December. 7,8,9,10.
So why are they the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months respectively!?

Apparently, there used to be only 10 months, back in the Romans' time. There were also 60 or so days of winter that just weren't part of a month. When they decided to do so, January and February came into being, giving us the full 12 that we see now.

But that still doesn't explain something. Why aren't January and February at the end of the year instead of the beginning!?

1. It would mean that the "numbered" months would retain their proper numerical positions.
2. It would mean that the 4 seasons would actually be grouped together, instead of being silly and splitting winter. Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter. So clean, so ordered, so much better.
3. It would actually make sense that February is a weird month, because it comes at the end of the year.

So I hereby humbly suggest to the powers that be in full knowledge that such a suggestion shall never be taken that we should move January and February to the end of the year where they belong.

Dream of Death

Diving into torrid sands, riding over ancient lands,

Drizzling on wrinkled hands remembrances from oceans green,

Envying the waters that they've never seen and never will.

Devil voices in their heads, rousing them from cozy beds,

Ever pressing on the threads and links that span their tortured brains,

Make them take a walk into the pouring rains that pierce and chill.

Apples drop upon their skulls, messy reason quickly dulls,

Ending in a song that lulls a soul into a siren's sleep,

Masking flashes pouring out away into a chasm deep.

Nudibranchs: Beauty of the Sea

Hypselodoris edenticulata: Florida Regal Sea Goddess

Okay, normally I would put these links and outside references at the end of the post, but there are so many beautiful pictures that you should REALLY look at that I am putting them right here for your convenience, so that no one is scared away by the long post itself.

More Pictures And Awesomeness!!
The Sea Slug Forum 
NudiPixel
National Geographic Nudibranch Gallery (David Doubilet)
Blue Dragon Pictures (Flickr--paulhypnos)
Nudibranch Gallery (Sergey Parinov)
The Right Blue


Now, on to the post! Pretty Sea Slugs!!
 Nudibranchs are shell-less mollusks upon which nature has decided to paint in pretty much every color imaginable. But these jelly-like sea slugs aren't just beautiful; with a spectrum of hues and adaptations, nudibranchs are masters of incorporating what they eat into their own bodies.

Halgerda terramtuentis: Gold lace nudibranch

If you're a nudibranch, you really are what you eat. They are carnivores that graze on everything from algae, sponges, and corals to anemones, barnacles, hydroids, and even other nudibranchs. Their color and their very survival is often derived from what they eat.

Many incorporate pigments from the coral they eat into their bodies, resulting in effective camouflage. Some can even store chloroplast in their outer membranes and let these chemical factories make sugar for them. Others instead incorporate the nematocysts (stinging cells) of jellyfish, hydroids, anemones, and other nudibranchs into the cerata (dorsal body wall) and use brighter colors to warn predators of their toxicity.

Glaucus atlanticus: Kinda looks like a Pokemon

Glaucus atlanticus (sea swallow), feeds on siphonophores like the deadly Portuguese Man o' War, collecting the stinging nematocysts in their feathery cerata. In fact, their sting is even worse than the original, because they appear to store the worst ones in high concentration. Beautiful but scary. o_O

Hexabranchus sanguineus: I whip my dress back and forth

Hexabranchus sanguineus is called the Spanish dancer for its beautiful red and white body and the fluttering dance-like swimming it exhibits, looking for all the world like a flamenco dancer's dress. Most nudibranchs chill out at the bottom of the sea, but the Spanish dancer swims freely. :)

Pteraeolidia ianthina: Great Blue Sun Dragon!!!

Pteraeolidia ianthina, otherwise known as the blue dragon, is solar powered! Yes, it's an animal, not a plant. Yes, it's blue. But just under that beautiful blue are green-brown zooxanthellae (microscopic plants), which it acquires as a juvenile form by nomming on hydroids. After it's developed enough, it can go quite a while without feeding, just subsisting on the sugars that the zooxanthellae provide in exchange for a sweet place to live.

Images:
Scuba Diving Magazine: Regal Goddess (Douglas Kahle)
The Right Blue: Gold Lace
Fuck Yeah Biology: The Blue Sea Slug
The Sea Slug Forum: Blue Dragon (Sukhdev Singh)

Technical Difficulties

"Vishesh! The computer is too far away!"

The Best Color

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Yes, the best color is indeed green. It is the color of this text, it is the color of this blog, it is the color in the middle of the visible spectrum, it is the color of plants, it is the color of spring (which is of course the best season), it is the color of nature, it is the color of life! 

The etymology of green involves the proto-indoeuropean root "ghre-" for "to grow", and the OED notes that "the associations with verdure, freshness, newness, health, and vitality are widespread among the Germanic languages." GREEN IS THE BEST!

But really, why are plants green anyway? Because plants use chlorophyll for photosynthesis, and chlorophyll absorbs and uses red and purple but reflects green. (Incidentally, if it weren't for chlorophyll and photosynthesis, there wouldn't be so much oxygen around, and we wouldn't be around, so green really is the color of life!)

Ok, but why is chlorophyll green? Why doesn't it use the entire visible spectrum instead of just the edges of it? Scientists don't know for sure, but there are three major hypotheses that seem the most reasonable (compared to others that just sound like excuses):

1. In the same way that we can't take in 100% of the oxygen in the air we breathe (it would be toxic) and don't release all the energy in glucose when we undergo cellular respiration (it would be explosive), using all the visible spectrum might involve dangerous energy levels that would damage cells.
2. Evolution is not engineering. Having evolved chlorophyll and photosynthesis (which, let's be honest, work pretty well as is), it might not be trivial to make the switch without passing through suboptimal levels. In general, this evolutionary constraint explains many differences between man-made and biological machines.
3. Certain archaea use retinal to utilize solar energy, and retinal does absorb the middle of the visible spectrum (these appear purple in color). If these evolved first in the ocean, the first cyanobacteria/algae might have lived under this purple film and thus been restricted to only using the tail ends of the visual spectrum, resulting in the chlorophyll we know today. 

Anyway, I wonder if it would make a difference to us--if plants were black or purple instead of green, would we love green as much as we do now? Would black and purple seem less dark? Or would we just like trees less? These answers lie in the realm of neuroscience and psychology (and perhaps philosophy), but until they're answered, I'll just say that I'm very glad our world is green. :D 

Biomemories: Golden Silk Orb-Weaver--A Natural Architect

Nephila clavipes

The genus Nephila are masters of architecture; derived from the Greek words nen(thread) and philos(love), their name epitomizes their spinning skills: they have the strongest silk in the world, are skilled builders, and can basically catch anything that can fly through a forest. From the equipment to the material to the design, they've got it all.

Nephila clavipes are part of the Arthropod subphylum Chelicerata, which includes scorpions, mites, and spiders. The male is a rather uninteresting brown and about 5 times smaller than the female, which has yellow and red stripes and spots and can grow up to 4 cm in length. It is the female who does all the extensive and elaborate web-building, while the males essentially just sit around about 5 cm above her, waiting for food and sex. She, on the other hand, stays quite busy building and repairing her web and wrapping and eating her food, using venom to paralyze it as she does so. Talk about gender inequality...

A weaver in her web

The Web:
Although she consumes part of her web at night for protein and rebuilds it every day, a Nephila can make webs that can last for 2 years, stretching to over a meter in diameter. In addition to the fine mesh orb seen above, she can construct barrier webs that protect the web from weather, birds, and other larger objects and also function as an alert to invaders and prey smashing against the web.

Furthermore, she may install zig-zag lines of structural silk to increase stability or open a hole to allow wind to blow through without destroying the entire web. Her silk's slightly yellow color has been shown to act both as an enticement for flower-seekers like bees and as camouflauge in shady areas with mottled sunlight. 
 She may incorporate more or less yellow pigment in her silk depending on light conditions in the area, revealing rather a complex mind behind that pretty body. Dr. Catherine Craig, an expert in the dynamic and active nature of spider webs, has explained that "Yellow is a very generalized visual signal that both herbivorous and pollinating insects associate with flowers and new leaf material...the insects may have a much harder time evolving a mechanism to avoid it."

Spider silk spigots

The Silk:
First of all, all silk is not made equal. Both the ingredients and the process differ from species to species, and Nephila clavipes, among others, can spin up to seven different kinds of silk, each with unique properties and purposes in its web.

With a tensile strength of 4×10⁹ N/m, their dragline silk is six times stronger than steel and 10 times more effective than Kevlar at dissipating energy, it has a plethora of potential uses, from parachutes, bullet-proof vests, and ropes to sutures, tendons, and ligaments.

One excellent example is the use of Nephila clavipes dragline silk in nerve guidance. Besides being incredibly strong, it is not only nonimmunogenic but also has antibacterial and antifungal properties. Furthermore, its structure promotes cell migration and adhesion and can even obtain its own myelin sheath in the presence of human Schwann cells. You'd think it was meant to be.

Just keep spinning, spinning, spinning...

So how on earth do they do it? Think of silk making in terms of steel manufacture: in order to make it, you need not only the iron but also the Bessemer process to transform that iron into beautiful, powerful steel. Silk works in much the same way. Spiders have both the proteins to make it and the tools to transform them into long, strong silk. Using alternating parallel molecules and random-ordered regions, spider silk is able to contract or expand according to pressure, thus enabling both flexibility and strength.

Biomimic Garry Hamilton elaborates, "A single spider-silk thread can be as small as one micron (i.e., one-thousandth of a millimetre) in diameter. The protein chains that form the threads are roughly another 1,500 times smaller still. What scientists suspect is that during spinning, the spider exerts a force that causes microscopic fistfuls of these protein chains to bend back on themselves and align with one another to form tiny crystals. These crystal chiplets, containing thousands of neatly arranged amino acids, apparently prevent microscopic cracks and hold the silk together....there's not an overabundance of crystal, thereby limiting the silk's density and maximizing elasticity."

This allows Nephila dragline silk to combine incredible tensile strength with elasticity up to 40% of its original length. In contrast, capture silk trades rigidity for serious flexibility by implementing spiral structures that allow for 300% extension to snag insects flying at high speeds without breaking.

Nature's architects are the best of the best from hundreds of millions of years of development, and we have a lot to learn, if we're willing to listen.


Image Sources and Cool Links:

Images:
Keith Ramos - Golden Silk Orb-Weaver
Wikipedia Commons - Nephila Clavipes - Merritt Island
Arachnology - Spider Silk (Dennis Kunkel)
Protein Spotlight - Nephila Clavipes (Frank Starmer)

General:
Animal Diversity - Nephila Clavipes
New York Times - Crafty Signs Spun in Web Say to Prey, 'Open Sky'

Web and Silk:
YouTube - Nephila Weaving Circumferential and Radial Fibers
Protein Spotlight - The Tiptoe of an Airbus

Biomemories: Peregrine Falcon--Need For Speed

Peregrine Falcons are raptors with keen eyes, strong wings, powerful beaks, and tremendous speed. Outside their nesting season, peregrine falcons earn their name by traveling extensively, as much as 15,500 miles a year. Once endangered by DDT and human development, they have rebounded and are now found all over the world. Though they prefer open spaces such as plains and sea coasts, they live everywhere from tundra to desert to cityscape.
Peregrine falcons are known for their speed. When they plummet to catch an unsuspecting pigeon below them, they can reach velocities over 200 miles per hour (320 km/h). That's over a fourth of the speed of sound. Zoom. But what's also fascinating about these remarkable birds are the adaptations that allow them to use such power.

The Eyes:
If a peregrine falcon is flying or perched over a kilometer in the air, as they often are, it would be useful, perhaps, to be able to see what it's trying to strike. While they're no mantis shrimp in terms of spectral range, they do indeed have some of the keenest eyes on the planet. With full color vision and rapidly focusing lenses, their eyes have a resolving power up to 8 times greater than humans, enabling them to spot prey miles away and keep track of it while approaching at breakneck speed.

The Wings:
To achieve 70 mph speeds in pursuit of prey and 200 mph plummets to attack those below, the peregrine falcon has one of the most streamlined bodies in the air. The curved wings create an air foil effect in multiple dimensions, maximizing maneuverability, lift, and speed. Besides the streamlined structure of the wings themselves, peregrine falcons maximize speed in every way possible. In pursuit, it can flap its wings up to four times a second, and in its dive it is able to let gravity pull it down with negligible air resistance, locking its wings in place to create minimum drag. The feathers themselves are stiff, slim, and unslotted, allowing them to literally slip through the air as they attack. As in all birds, their wings are hollow, enhancing flight and maneuverability in the air.

The Power:
Small tubercles and bones in the nose prevent the immense air pressure from flowing into and rupturing their respiratory system. In addition to tons of strong red muscle fibers, peregrine falcons have one-way lungs, like most birds, to maximize oxygen intake. To achieve torpedo-like speed both horizontally and vertically, peregrine falcons have an enormous keel, part of the sternum. As the attachment site for flight muscles, the larger the keel, the more powerful the flight, and this makes these birds some of the fastest in the world.

A National Geographic video tracking a peregrine falcon's flight speeds from the air.

The Attack:
Now, if you were to drop a couple hundred stories, you'd probably be going pretty fast too. The question, then, is whether you'd be able to catch something, halt your dive, and be in a medical condition to eat it. From the muscle, to the talons, to the beak, these raptors are serious predators. When their keen eyes finish guiding their dive into their prey, if the impact of 200mph razor-sharp talons hitting a poor pigeon's back doesn't kill it, the tomial tooth of their strong beak can break the stunned bird's spine in a second. Then the falcon can leisurely eat it in the air or on the ground, after plucking its feathers, of course.


Image Sources and Cool Links:

Speed and Strike:
Extreme Science - Fastest on Earth
HowStuffWorks - How Do Peregrine Falcons Fly So Fast?
National Geographic - High-Velocity Falcons

General:
Cornell Lab of Ornithology - Peregrine Falcon
National Geographic - Peregrine Falcon

Images:
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Ozzie
TreeHugger - DDT Redux
Jerry Ting - Peregrine Falcon

Biomemories: Mantis Shrimp--Pinnacle of Evolution

These Biomemories are posts that once graced my high school's biology club blog, which has fallen into disrepair since I graduated. I hope that the relative length doesn't deter anyone from reading these, because they really are really cool animals. :D

Overview:

What, you may ask, is a mantis shrimp? It's neither a mantis nor a shrimp, but might be what you would get if you could make J.K. Rowling-esque hybrids and pumped in a lot of magic. View at your own peril.

Mantis shrimp are essentially a true beacon of evolutionary progress. You will soon see that if a scientist wanted to prove the absolute amazingness of evolution, this would be the creature to pick. And they're not just one species, or even a genus: they make up an entire order, if a small one: Stomatopoda.

They're marine crustaceans, reaching about a foot in length, usually living and looking for food on the ocean floor, chilling out in rock formations or tunnels they build in the sea bed. They diverged from other crustaceans over 400 million years ago during the Cambrian period, so they are only distantly related to the likes of shrimp and lobsters. They mostly live in tropical waters, and can be diurnal, nocturnal, or crepuscular and have an extremely diverse diet, both of which characteristics depend on the species.

Why Mantis Shrimp?

If I were to tell you that the mantis shrimp is not just a crustacean, but a very intelligent crustacean that is long lived (monogamous for up to 20 years) and exhibits complex behavior like ritualized fighting (common in larger phyla like mammals and reptiles), excellent learning ability and memory (they can remember the individuals they meet, by sight, smell, and sound), and several modes of communication (like fluorescence, smell, sound, and visual cues), you would probably agree that this is one awesome order.

But wait! There's more!

The same organisms, the same order, that has all of these complex and highly developed characteristics, also has amazing vision. Mantis shrimp have hyperspectral color vision, allowing them to see and distinguish anywhere from infrared to visible to ultraviolet light at once. They are each separated into three bands (trinocular vision), allowing each eye to see objects from three different perspectives, giving both of them highly-developed depth perception. Their eyes, mounted on stalks and capable of moving independently, can sense up to twelve distinct color channels extending to UV, can execute both serial and parallel image processing, have up to 10,000 ommatidia (the individual parts of compound eyes) and 16 different photoreceptor types (where as humans have 4), and can distinguish polarised light (the orientation of the oscillations of the waves of light).

Before it was discovered that mantis shrimp could see circular polarized light, there were only three known modes of sight - black and white, color, and linearly polarized vision. So mantis shrimp alone occupy a quarter of the known ways of perceiving light. Mantis shrimp eyes have special filters that convert circular polarized light into linear polarized light. To humans, linear polarized light appears as glare; but for mantis shrimp, the polarized light is used in mating displays. Gonodactylus smithii is one of two known species that can see circular polarized light, finishing up all the possibilities (four linear and two polar) for polarized light and thus is the only known organism to have optimal polarization vision. There are a couple of theories as to why they developed these legit eyes, which include improved communications using the fluorescence we talked about earlier and internal processing of images within the eye so that the small brain can have some help from the rest of the nervous system.

If you don't want to read that awesome paragraph packed with so many cool facts, just know that stomatopod eyes are largely considered to be the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom.

But wait! There's more!

These same organisms, this same order, that has such complex behavior, intelligence, life-span, and vision also has some of the coolest weapons on the planet (just remember that these guys are violent). So mantis shrimp, as you may have guessed or seen in the pictures, have these claw-type appendages. There are two kinds of mantis shrimp: spearers and smashers. Spearers have spiny, pointy arms to skewer, snag, and generally catch and slice prey, while smashers have clubs that they use to...smash stuff.

The raw data for their punches:

Peak speeds: 23 m/s (75 ft/s) (fastest kick in the world)

Peak accelerations: 10400 g (like a .22 caliber bullet)

Immediate strike force: 1500 N

That's one of the top fastest movements in the animal kingdom, and the fastest feeding strike.

The punch is so fast and so powerful that it creates a collapsing cavity between the claw and the victim. When it collapses, it produces sonoluminescense(a little light and very high temperatures) and an explosive shock wave. Essentially, with one punch, the prey is hit twice: once by the original (1500N) punch, and once by the resulting shock wave, which can often paralyze or even kill small prey.

How do they do it?

Using a saddle shaped structure (a hyperbolic paraboloid) in their arm cavities, they can store immense amounts of elastic energy and then shoot out their arm with tremendous acceleration, speed, and force. Considerable developments of what we know about stomatopods and the strike in particular have come from Sheila Patek, Wyatt Korff, and Roy Caldwell, from Berkeley. According to Science Daily:

"Patek is currently conducting experiments which show that the blow yields a tremendous amount of force - well over a hundred times the mantis shrimp's body weight.

In a short note appearing in Nature, Patek and her colleagues, graduate student Wyatt Korff and professor of integrative biology Roy Caldwell, report the record-setting strike and the unusual saddle-shaped spring in the hinge of the shrimp's striking appendage that makes it all possible.

This spring is technically a hyperbolic paraboloid, a structure similar to a Pringles potato chip. Very strong, especially when compressed, hyperbolic paraboloids have been used by architects to create structures that don't easily buckle. The nautilus employs this structural element to build a sturdier shell. In mantis shrimp, however, the saddle-shaped structure can also function as a spring, the UC Berkeley researchers found. It stores energy until a quick release propels the shrimp's club in a shell-crushing blow.

"We know of no other biological example where this saddle-shaped structure is used as a spring," Patek said."

Here's a video of Patek presenting the stomatopod's kick to the TED conference in 2004.

A few key time points:

1:20 - types of mantis shrimp

2:30 - striking speeds

4:55 - kicking mechanism

8:55 - striking force

10:20 - cavitation

13:45 - prevention of claw deterioration

So, now you know stomatopods. One order's got it all: intelligence, complex behavior, a long life-span, Superman-like vision, and a spring-loaded hyper-punch. Evolution for the win.

  

Image Sources and Cool Links:

The Eyes:

Wired Blog - The Magnificent, Ultra-Violent, Far-Seeing Shrimp from Mars (by Brandon Keim, Image: Justin Marshall)

Wired Blog - Shrimp Eyes May Hold Key to Better Communications (by Brandon Keim, Image: Roy Campbell)

Science Daily - Mantis Shrimp Vision Reveals New Way That Animals Can See

The Claws:

TED - Sheila Patek Clocks the Fastest Animal on Earth

Trek Earth - Mantis Shrimp (Image: Rabani HMA, 2006)

Fluorescence:

UC Berkeley News - Mantis Shrimp Fluoresce to Enhance Signaling in the Dim Ocean Depths

General:

UC Berkeley - Roy's List of Stomatopods for the Aquarium

The Lurker's Guide to Stomatopods - Stomatopod Biology

Riddle Me This (Part 2)

The wind blows through my leaves

Revealing the continents,

The islands, the oceans, the seas.

And then, as if a giant spider had come
And laid its web down across the globe,
My leaves divide the land with rivers and lines.

As if you were old and sitting on cheese
I contain the whole world for you to see,
Its contours and surfaces and curves,
Its divisions and states and nations.

What's Black and White and Awesome All Over?

 

My panda? Well done, that's correct! 

But you know what else?

The crosswords in the book it's holding!

Today I received Word., a crossword book with puzzles made by students from Brown, all of whom have already had puzzles published in The New York Times, among other prestigious publications. With titles like "funketown," "get thee to a punnery!" and "om nom nom," you know that these are not your everyday crosswords. As Will Shortz says at the end of a laudatory foreword, "the future of crosswords is in good hands." :D

Declaring a Degree

This month I'm going to declare my concentration (because at Brown we like to concentrate rather than major, apparently), and on the form it will say "Sc.B. Computational Biology." And when I graduate, on my degree it will say "Sc. B. Computational Biology."

But really, if I could go back 2 years, I would want to concentrate in happiness. The subject, of course, is fundamentally interdisciplinary (as most things are, honestly). There would be a two major areas, namely

1. The biology of happiness
1. Evolution - Why does it exist?
2. Cognitive science - What is it?
3. Neurobiology - How does it work?
2. The generation of happiness
1. Economics/game theory - Why people do what they do.
2. Psychology/statistics - The prereqs for and barriers to it.
3. Mediation/ethics - How to make people happy.

The first half is just to understand what happiness really is, and the second is how to act in the real world, given that understanding. And if I was able to do this, and concentrate in happiness, I would be able to do anything I wanted, because I would not only know how to make myself happy but also how to make other people happy, all the time. How fun would that be!? :D

Swimming

Catch the back of a loggerback

And ride away below the waves

Where the water is smoother

The water is warmer

The water is faster

And carries you both along.

Catch the fin of a dolphin

And fly from crest to crest

Diving and jumping

And speeding away

Into the shining sea.

Catch the tail of a big blue whale

And rise and fall, rise and fall

Like a vertical juggernaut

Propelled ever forward

Never looking back from a fluke

Always flying forward. 

ReadCube

 

In case it hasn't become obvious, I read a lot of random scientific articles, both in my discipline and outside it. It would be really nice to have an actual legit pdf-reader to view and organize them without having to either download and print or file them every time I want to research something like hummingbirds flying or carbon nanotubules. Well, my wishes have been answered!

ReadCube! It's really cool! It's a really nice pdf-reader with nice viewing and referencing for academic literature, mostly journal articles. You can take notes, highlight, generate citations, even click references in the pdf and download them in just a couple clicks. Score! Plus it has integrated search and download from PubMed and Google, and you can save multiple sets of search results for future perusal. There's even a web reader for journals like Nature, so you can edit and highlight online and then download and store it in the application. And it's free, of course. :D

OMG! WNBMM (Part 4)

Today is a Fibonacci day! Earlier I said that 2 consecutive Fibonacci numbers are relatively prime. Now I know why!

Take a Fibonacci number, and square it. Then, separately, take product of the one before it and the one after it.

These two numbers will differ by exactly 1. Try it!!

Sequence: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,...

1*1 = 1, 0*1 = 0.

1*1 = 1, 1*2 = 2.

2*2 = 4, 1*3 = 3.

3*3 = 9, 2*5 = 10.

5*5 = 25, 3*8 = 24.

8*8 = 64, 5*13 = 65.

13*13 = 169, 8*21 = 168.

Summary: Fibonacci is ridiculous. In the coolest ways possible. :D

Ancient Runes

Ancient runes upon a wall,

How many loops are there in all?

Artistic Talent

I am not good at drawing. This particular masterpiece is certainly not mine--if I had to draw it (and I did have to), it would be much less recognizable. Apparently it was, anyway, because in the game of Pictionary this picture came from, its identity was guessed instantly by the team whose player drew the above work of ark, but not by mine. No, I'm not really passive aggressive or anything like that--I'm well aware that my drawing skills are poor and that I was in the presence of a hidden master. After all, there must be something special about a man who can draw an anchor like a mushroom and still make it recognizable as an anchor. :)

Weather--Just Do It!

Look, Weather. Either you can decide to troll us and shower snow till late March, or you can get with the times and let it be spring already. This whole sunny but cold, a little shower, a little snow, a lot of clouds, does nothing but make the ground first icily slippery and then grossly mushy. Even the trees and cars are only half frosted over. If you're going to do something, weather, don't be so wishy-washy about it. Give it your all! Let it pour! Let it snow! Let the sun shine! No one can stop you (yet), so take command and be all you can be. I believe in you.

You Know, Creamy Soup Needs Croutons...

What do you get when you combine chocolate and croutons? The new and improved oatmeal-yogurt delight comes with brownie bits and two times the strawberry swirls! Think sweet, creamy soup with garnish and croutons, but instead of an appetizer, this is dessert! YUM!

Salt and Pepper -- An Ancient Couple?

Just by looking at them, you can tell that they are very, very different foods. Salt is made of tiny grains of pure white, while pepper is a mix of black and white and brown.

More specifically, table salt is the very simple compound NaCl, one of many "salts" in the chemical sense of the term. It dissolves easily, disappearing into solid and liquid food alike with just a little stirring or mixing. On the other hand, the "hot" part of pepper is an organic compound, piperine, but black pepper is ground dried peppercorns, which is why it is much more heterogeneous. It doesn't dissolve at all, and it is very easy to tell exactly how much pepper is in or on any given dish.

So why are these two together, anyway? Certainly they've each been used for a long time. Salt has long been prized for its ability to preserve food, to the extent that "salt roads" in the Bronze Age (think 1000-2000 B.C.) were made specifically to transport salt to deprived regions. In fact, salt is essential for many animals in small quantities, with "saltiness" being a basic human taste. 

Pepper, has also been used dating back to 2000 B.C. in India, and was similarly prized and transported for European consumption. Indeed, if it weren't for salt and pepper (as well as other spices), European exploration and colonization would have been much slower, and history very different. Anyway, in France (where else?) pepper officially joined salt as a ubiquitous condiment under the fork of Louis XIV, who considered it better than other spices that overrode the flavor of most dishes. 

And they have lived happily together ever since! :)

Riddle Me This (Part 1)

I watch a potter every day,

I watch him as he grows older,

Unable to guard his precious pots

Or the flowers inside them
 From harrying hares and rabbits.

I visit the flowers every day,

Tickling their golden faces,

Moving from one to the next

Until I've seen them all,
And shared in their sweet joy. :)

The Great Parade

SO. MANY. GOATS.