Hundred of millions of years ago, sea creatures crawled up on land and started to become mammals. Then much later, a few went back into the sea, but left few fossils to show us how they did it -or at least that's what we used to think.
For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.
These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link
Or maybe in this case, you could say "statement blanket"! Julie made this warm and funny pun blanket that really makes a statement for her boyfriend's birthday gift.
Over the summer, my boyfriend and I were making up puns based on bedding (“post-modern four-post bed” and the ilk) and came up with "blanket statement blanket.” It took about 14 hours to complete.
Rudolph the Red-nose Reindeer got into a bit of trouble Saturday when he was impaled on a traffic light pole during the 2010 Dominion Christmas Parade in Richmond, Virginia. Link-Thanks, Comedy Wizard!
Slate has an interactive map showing when and where cases of diabetes are soaring. At the link, you can adjust the year with a slider and mouseover the counties to find yours. My county had a diabetes rate of 11.4% in 2008. http://labs.slate.com/articles/diabetes-in-america/ -via Gene Expression
Are you sure you know how to pronounce these words aloud? Do you have any other examples of words you were surprised to hear pronounced for the first time? Link -via The Daily What
by Frederic N. Firestone, Ph.D., J.D. Virginia Beach, Virginia
[EDITOR'S NOTE: On May 24, 2001, two years after this article was published, a research report and accompanying editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine claimed that the placebo effect does not exist. Clearly, the New England Journal authors did not read Frederic Firestone's classic report on double-strength placebos.]
Too often, good research about new medicines—research that shows unusually clear-cut results—goes unpublished, and thus unseen. The reason? Journal editors distrust any study in which the placebo effect is "too small." The problem has a simple solution: re-run the experiment, but instead of giving standard placebos to the control group, instead give them double-strength placebos (DSPs).
The placebo effect is the response that a so-called "control group" of patients shows when those patients are treated with placebos—innocuous "pretend" medicine—rather than with real medicine.
Prior Research on Placebos
Scientists have studied a wide variety of placebo issues, and published reports about what they found.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] Yet prior to this investigation, no one has published a report on the problem of minimal placebo response.
The Need to Study Double-Strength Placebos
While certain problems are associated with the use of the double-strength placebo, overall it offers promises to be a powerful research tool.
Approval of the DSP by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must of course precede its use. Since its efficacy must be demonstrated in a proper study, the immediate problem is the choice of a placebo to give the control group of that study. There is no documentation of the dif-fering strengths of the placebos that are currently available, so it would be appropriate to first determine these strengths, and then select a control placebo that has median effect.
Patient Sensitivity and Safety
There is a more serious problem in studying the efficacy of double-strength placebos. As with any new drug, we must confront the possibility of deleterious effects upon individuals who may exhibit a high level of sensitivity to placebos.[8] Most important, of course, is to find a safe, practical way to identify patients who are acutely allergic to placebos. The public will to tolerate a rash of placebo deaths, nor should it have to.
The expense of safety-testing the placebos can be mitigated by a research setting suggested here.
Special Observation Facility
The subjects of the double-strength placebo study should have the DSPs administered in a specially prepared room, one equipped not with the traditional "one-way mirror," but instead with a large, clear glass window. This is a necessity, because any subjects who noticed a large mirrored opening in a wall would understand that they were being observed, and that might lead to skewed results.
The large glass window should have an ordinary venetian blind on the observers’ side of the glass, with the slats arranged at an angle permitting optimal light transmission. On the other side of the glass, there should be a blind of vertical slats, of the type commonly used on sliding glass patio doors, with the slats arranged at a suitable angle. For the subjects, this provides a reassuringly familiar home-like setting. The main advantage of this arrangement, though, is that with minimal effort and expense, it ensures a double-blind experiment.
When the study results are submitted to the Food and Drug Administration, it is essential to emphasize that approval of double-strength placebos will be of value only if no required warning label is required. The reason for this is simple. Even a statement worded in the most approving way (e.g., "The Surgeon General has determined that this placebo is harmless despite its potency") may limit the usefulness of the product.
Technical Note
The molecular structure of the DSP being a merely technical matter, it is beneath the scope of this article.
1. "Placebos: relative merits of H2O and H2SO4," A. Amoamasamat, Journal of Patheohomic Medicine, vol. 2, 1989, pp. 6-14.
2. "Polished gravel as a placebo: some technical problems," A. Amoamasamat, Western Medical Repository, vol. 8, 1990, pp. 46-47.
3. "Why diabetics react strangely to many placebos," A. Amoamasamat, Molasses and Sugar Quarterly, vol. 23, 1991, pp. 56-60.
4. "LSD: a reason to avoid its use as a placebo," A. Amoamasamat, Cactus Times, vol. 1, pp. 1-84.
5. "When the placebo suppository is more effective than the therapeutic agent: a suggestion to practitioners," A. Amoamasamat, Tips for Managed Care, vol. 3, 1993, pp. 8-9.
6. "Patients who are displeased by placebos: a terminological mystery," A. Amoamasamat, Journal of Medical Linguistics, vol. 88, 1994, pp. 5-22.
7. "Forged prescriptions for placebos: a crime with mitigating circumstances? in A. Miss, ed., The Wrong is Ended But the Felony Lingers On, A. Amoamasamat, New York, Paris, and Casablanca: Who’s Publishing, 1996.
8. "Overly sensitive users of placebos: a statistical analysis of post-mortem examinations," A. Amoamasamat, unpublished, 1997. Was available from the author prior to his recent replication of the study. The author’s widow does not respond to requests for copies.
Notes
i. The author completed this article at the fishing facility of Virginia Beach, where it was immediately subjected to pier review.
ii. The problems involved in using two-way mirrors, three-way mirrors, etc., will be addressed in a separate publication, as will the problems related to using zero-way mirrors.
This article is republished with permission from the March-April 1999 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Brody Qat attended a gathering of Santas as her character "Desaturated Santa", which she introduced last year, and posted photographs at Flickr. To counter many accusations of Photoshoppage, she also posted a picture of her makeup and contact lenses to explain how it's done. She said:
Many people find it hard to believe that someone would go to all the effort of creating a gray & white Santa suit and painting their face, when it’s “so much easier just to do it in Photoshop”. (Yes, but where’s the fun in THAT? Heck, why visit Paris when I can just Photoshop myself in front of a picture of the Eiffel Tower?)
In the Catalan region of Spain, it is customary to include a "caganer", or defecating figure somewhere in your Christmas nativity scene -far away from the manger. Caganers come in all styles, including pop culture figures like super heroes and movie characters, as you'll see in this gallery from a Spanish blog. Link-Thanks, Dani!
Traditional folklore says that when a beekeeper dies, the bees must be told of the death promptly, or else they will either weaken and quit working, or they will flee the hive. This custom is found in far-flung locations around the world.
In China, Beehives are turned a different direction after the death of their keeper, hinting at a superstition that harkens back to a more ancient custom. Details vary, but the essence remains the same – tell the Bees, and quickly. In England circa 1840, a woman inquired if the Bees had been informed of the death of their keeper and upon learning they had not, proceeded to prepare a dish of spice cake and sugar and presented it to the hive while jingling her keys and reciting the following rhyme;
“Honey bees, Honey bees, hear what I say! Your Master J.A. has passed away. But his wife now begs you will freely stay, And still gather honey for many a day. Bonny bees, Bonny bees, hear what I say.”
The story is but a small part of Andrew Gough's fascinating three-part post on the history of bees and beekeeping. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
The Liljenquist family collected thousands of photographs of Civil War soldiers over the years. Brandon Liljenquist saw a collection of war photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan and was inspired to make the Civil War photos public. This year, the family donated 400 of those pictures to the Library of Congress for a collection called The Last Full Measure.
Laying out the photographs at home for the last time, and thinking about the collection in a whole new light, I couldn't help but notice how similar the faces of these boys were to those we'd seen in The Washington Post. Here were the young men who did most of the fighting and dying. In their eyes and the eyes of their loved ones, I could see the full range of human emotion. It was all here: the bravado, the fear, the readiness, the weariness, the pride and the anguish. The loneliness in their long, distant stares overwhelmed me.
The original photographs will be on display next year in Washington, but are available now online. Link to story. Link to photographs. -via Metafilter
Combine a well-trained dog with a helpful grocer, and you may never have to leave the house again! Zhang Tiegang of Changsha, China trained his dog Deng Deng to go shopping. Deng Deng is outfitted with a special harness and saddlebags, and is sent to the store on his own.
Tiegang said: 'He just loves to carry things. He started by begging to carry things home in his mouth so I built a little saddle for him and attached some shopping bags.
'He's so good at it now that I can just send him to the shop with some money and a list in one of his bags and he comes home with the food and the change.'
There's no word on how skilled Deng Deng is at selecting the freshest produce. Link -via Rue the Day
On October 28, a team led by Steve Daniels, John Oates and Lester Haines launched a camera-equipped helium balloon that soared to an altitude of 90,000 feet before it collapsed. At that point, it released a paper airplane, named the Vulture I, also equipped with a video camera. The project named Paris (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) was sponsored by The Register. The Vulture I was recovered from its landing spot in Spain. See the videos at YouTube and find out more from an index of articles at The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/paris/ -via the Presurfer
Science Service was a nonprofit news organization that decided to "jazz up" their information releases by adding humorous pictures in the 1920s. Some of these "cartoonographs" are preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. Many of the early cartoonographs were drawn by Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin; see more examples at The Bigger Picture. Link -via Nag on the Lake
(YouTube link) Vi Hart calls herself a "recreational mathemusician", which sounds like fun! In this video, she teaches more about math than she missed by doodling during class. See more of this sort of thing at her website. Link-Thanks, David Israel!
