The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

Further data mining on a masterful researcher of the human condition
by Don Danila
East Lyme, Connecticut

A recent monograph in AIR, republished here, documented in detail the fascinating research career of John W. Trinkaus. In describing Trinkaus’s research, which has focused on the often quirky behavior and motivations of humans, the authors supplied detailed citations of his publications. A casual perusal of this summary enabled me to make several inferences about the life and career of the author himself.

Trinkaus -- The Lone Wolf
An examination of any scientific journal shows a tendency -- especially in recent years -- towards multiple authorship research papers. After all, much of science tends to be collaborative. In this respect, Trinkaus has swum against the tide and has almost always gone it alone (see Figure 1).

Fully 94% of Trinkaus’s publications have no co-author. What is the reason for this apparent lack of collegial support? It may be that his study sites -- street intersections, supermarket checkouts, entrances to offices or subways and so forth -- do not lend themselves to multiple observers of human activities. After all, an individual casually lingering at one of these locations may not call attention to himself, whereas two or more people with clipboards, counters, and stopwatches may more easily invite notice from the subjects who are being observed, thereby altering behavior and invalidating the research.

Trinkaus – Short Circuiting the Publication Process
Unlike many scientists who endeavor to publish in a wide variety of journals to attract a wide readership, early on in his career Trinkaus found his publishers, and then stuck with them (see Figure 2).

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If you are only familiar with Muhammad Ali in his later years, suffering the effects of Parkinson’s, here’s a reminder of what a silver-tongued self-promoter he was in his prime. In this press conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1974, a few months prior to his world championship fight with George Foreman, Ali explains how good he is, in terms that can only be described as poetry.

I have wrestled with an alligator
I done tussled with a whale
I done handcuffed lightning
Throwed thunder in jail

-via reddit

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Lottie the African grey parrot has been watching a few James Bond movies! She’s got the voice down, the phrase, and even the theme song. But does she understand the implications of channeling the world’s greatest spy? Maybe not. She has to ask: “What’s that all about?” -via Tastefully Offensive

Mid Century Menu is a blog where RetroRuth reproduces recipes of the 1950s and thereabouts. You know, the recipes that use Jell-o, Miracle Whip, and Campbell’s soup that we laugh at today. For St. Patricks Day last year, she tried Hearty Corned Beef Salad. Now, corned beef is not a thing in Ireland, although it was adopted by early Irish-American immigrants. And of course, the recipe is molded with Jell-o -lemon flavor this time. Other ingredients are corned beef, mayonnaise, celery, onions, peppers, and hard-boiled eggs. If that sounds totally disgusting, check out the reaction from RetroRuth’s husband, Tom:

“How horrible is it?”

“I love it.”

“Shut up! Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“You know, maybe you have been eating too many gelatins.”

“Or drinking too many drinks. There might be lots of reasons.”

The most remarkable thing about the recipe is the sound it made. Read all about the experience at Mid Century Menu. -via Metafilter

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Carson Dean has quite the skill -he can dance even when the floor is moving underneath him! Watch him get down to “Uptown Funk” without losing his balance even the slightest bit. Don’t believe me? Just watch! If that were me, I'd have my frontward and backward confused in no time at all. That would look more like this. -via Viral Viral Videos

Buzz Aldrin was at Stonehenge on Sunday and “decided to send a message to the cosmos,” as he put it in his Tweet. If you can’t read the full slogan on his t-shirt, see the enlarged version here. The comments at reddit are mostly derails, but this one stood out:

Imagine, in full view of the world, you take a step onto a new frontier. Your foot presses down upon a celestial canvas that has been a source of folklore, myth and religious speculation for millennia. You are progress incarnate and after your time in the limelight you are eager to see your progress become the stepping stone for even greater accomplishments.

You wait a while and you see progress here and there. More discoveries are made about the nature of our universe. Machinery is sent to distant masses to search for signs of life. But there isn't any progress like what you imagined the first moment that your foot imprinted upon that fine lunar soil.

You're aging now. You're getting older and that progress still hasn't been made. You wonder what landing on the moon really accomplished if it wasn't a stepping stone for even greater things, but then you hear whisperings of plans to colonize Mars. This is what you've been waiting for. This is the next step. This is the fulfillment of your expectations and you yearn to see it.

A sentence rises from the depths of your desire and escapes your lips, "Get your ass to Mars."

If only they would do it in time.

Aldrin is actively pushing for NASA to send astronauts to Mars, and even wrote a book about it.

(Image credit: James O.Davies)

Biology grad students, make a note to yourself not to cross an octopus with a cow. As if that would ever be remotely possible. This is from a Buzzfeed list called 15 Jokes That Only Biologists Will Fully Understand. That’s not quite true; you don’t have to be a biologist to understand them, really, you just have to know some biology terms. Most are puns, but this one made me laugh out loud. Check them out and let me know if you have any better ones.  

Twenty years ago, the Smithsonian Institution received a donation of a wheelchair. It had belonged to Ed Roberts, who had recently died after an extraordinary life. The article is nominally about the wheelchair, but it’s really a tribute to Ed Roberts, an early leader in the disability rights movement who was called “the father of independent living.”   

A post-polio quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down and dependent on a respirator, Roberts was the first severely disabled student to attend the University of California at Berkeley, studying political science, earning a BA in 1964 and an MA in 1966, and nurturing there a nascent revolution. At UC Berkeley, Roberts and a cohort of friends pioneered a student-led disability services organization, the Physically Disabled Students Program, which was the first of its kind on a university campus and the model for Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living (CIL), where Roberts served as executive director from 1972 to 1975. Over time, from that first CIL, sprang hundreds of independent living centers across the country.

Roberts himself was a model—a joyful, positive model—of independence: He married, fathered a son, and divorced; he once swam with dolphins, rafted down the Stanislaus River in California, and studied karate.

None of these accomplishments were easy. For instance, the state didn’t want to confer his high school diploma because he didn’t pass P.E. or driver’s education. But Roberts learned to persevere against those who told him what he could or could not do. And he went on to fight battles on behalf of others, as a disabilities rights activist on campus, in the community, and in the legislatures that decided what accommodations people with disabilities would receive. Read the story of Ed Roberts at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: National Museum of American History)

Chinese cuisine, like that of any country, consists of a wide variety of available foods turned into dinner with a wide variety of recipe the family cook -or restaurant cook- knows. America has a tendency to adapt and change world cuisines to suit our own tastes. That’s not always a bad thing. As we saw in a recent video, just because a recipe isn’t “authentic” doesn’t mean it isn’t good. So there’s Chinese food and there’s Americanized Chinese food. How did they come to be so different? It was a series of steps over a long period of time.   

The first Chinese restaurants in America served authentic Chinese dishes with modifications borne from necessity. They were known as “chow chow” restaurants, marked by triangular yellow flags and known for their cheap prix-fixe specials and all-you-can-eat dollar menus. The eateries were created by the Chinese for the Chinese, using local ingredients that were available to them. These substitutions occurred mostly in the vegetable department: broccoli for kailan; carrots, peas, and white button mushrooms in place of mustard greens or shiitakes.

The restaurants became a target of ridicule by Westerners who cringed at the thought of eating whole animals, poultry feet, and bird’s nest. Rumors spread that the Chinese were consuming rats and dogs. The restaurants were quickly dismissed as barbaric. The tide eventually shifted. Around the 1880s in New York City, a growing community of bohemian writers and intellectuals began to embrace the exoticism of the food (and readily welcomed chop suey’s 63-cent price tag).

But that’s just part of the story in An Illustrated History of Americanized Chinese Food. Even the fairly short article at First We Feast doesn’t tell the whole story, although it’s a good overview of a long process.

(Image credit: Albert Hsu)

Canada Lynx were almost wiped out in the Western U.S., until a program to re-introduce them to Colorado was initiated in the 1990s. After a few false starts, the lynx learned to hunt squirrels and other prey instead of relying on the snowshoe hare. Can a similar program bring lynx back to Britain?

The Eurasian lynx was a part of the British forest ecosystem until about a thousand years ago. Conservationists at Lynx UK Trust plan to ship lynx from Eastern Europe to preserves in England and Scotland. The program is expected to benefit the forests themselves, by restoring the balance of nature with an apex predator. That is, if the environment is found to be suitable for them. The territory must be big enough, natural prey must be abundant enough, and the neighbors have to be okay with it. Read about the “rewilding” plan for lynx in Britain at Wired. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Vogelfoto69)

Only one in about 3,000 calico cats are male. You knew that, but the explanation of how sex and cat fur color are so intertwined is a new one for me. The explanation starts with a refresher on X and Y chromosomes. Females have two X, and males have an X and a Y. In cats, the X chromosome determines fur color. Unless that color is white. A cat with two X chromosomes (female) only uses one of them, while the other will go dormant.

The important thing here is that the same X-chromosome does not inactivate for each cell. One cell may shut off the X-chromosome from the mother while leaving the chromosome from the father. That cell then creates more cells, each of which will use the father’s X-chromosome to determine the fur color. Likewise, another cell may silence the X-chromosome from the father and instead use the chromosome from the mother.

So, for instance, if the female offspring receives the chromosome for black fur from both of its parents, she will have black fur. In the case of calico cats, the same process occurs. However, the offspring receives the chromosome for, for instance, black fur from one parent and orange fur from the other. One cell inactivates the chromosome for black fur resulting in orange fur. Other cells use the chromosome for black fur instead. In both cases, these cells are replicated and the inactivated chromosome will always stay inactive. Those two colors then combine on the cat’s fur to create the orange and black patches of fur. If the cat only has these two colors, it is known as a tortoiseshell cat.

But what about white? That’s a different story, because white cat fur isn’t dependent on sex chromosomes. Any cat can have white fur, or patches of white fur. And then there are the rare male calico cats. Read how that happens in the full post at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Flickr user Erica Zabowski)

Neanderthals were stylish cavemen and cavewomen, and their jewelry was cool by today’s standards. Eight talons from white-tailed eagles were unearthed in a Croatian cave used by Neanderthals that were possibly worn as necklaces or bracelets. That was a hundred years ago, but the significance of the talons is just now coming to light.    

The talons were first excavated more than 100 years ago at a famous sandstone rock-shelter site called Krapina in Croatia. There, archaeologists found more than 900 Neanderthal bones dating back to a relatively warm, interglacial period about 120,000 to 130,000 years ago. They also found Mousterian stone tools (a telltale sign of Neanderthal occupation), a hearth and the bones of rhinos and cave bears, but no signs of modern human occupation. Homo sapiens didn't spread into Europe until about 40,000 years ago.

The eagle talons were all found in the same archaeological layer, Frayer said, and they had been studied a few times before. But no one noticed the cut marks until last year, when Davorka Radovčić, curator of the Croatian Natural History Museum, was reassessing some of the Krapina objects in the collection.

The researchers don't know exactly how the talons would have been assembled into jewelry. But Frayer said some facets on the claws look quite polished — perhaps made smooth from being wrapped in some kind of fiber, or from rubbing against the surface of the other talons. There were also nicks in three of the talons that wouldn't have been created during an eagle's life, Frayer said.

The idea of Neanderthals wearing jewelry gives us a glimpse into their minds, and scientists are debating whether how capable they were of abstract and symbolic thinking. The talons may have been worn as trophies, or they may have been worn for decoration, or maybe both. Read more about Neanderthal jewelry at Live Science. -via mental_floss

(Image credit: Luka Mjeda, Zagreb)

The following is an article from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

These days almost every retailer has some kind of loyalty program- frequent flyer miles, grocery store club cards, even low-tech cardboard punchcards at the local sandwich shop. But 100 years ago it all started …with trading stamps.

(Image credit: Flickr user Chuck Coker)

REDEEMING IDEA

Back in 1896, a silverware salesman named Thomas Sperry was making his regular rounds of the stores in Milwaukee when he noticed that one store was having success with a unique program. They were rewarding purchases with coupons redeemable for store goods. That gave Sperry an idea: why not give out coupons that weren’t tied to merchandise from a particular store, but were redeemable anywhere in the country?

With backing from local businessman Shelly Hutchinson, he started the Sperry and Hutchinson Company, and began selling trading stamps. Here’s how it worked:

* S&H sold stamps (they looked like small postage stamps, each with a red S&H insignia on a green background) to retailers.

* Retailers gave them to customers as a bonus for purchases, ten stamps for each dollar spent.

* Customers collected the stamps in special S&H books until they had enough to trade back to Sperry and Hutchinson in exchange for merchandise like tea sets or cookware.

* Retailers who participated in the program hoped that customers would feel like they were getting something for free, which would entice them to continue to shop loyally at their stores.

* At first only a few stores across the country offered the stamps, but over the next 50 years, through economic recessions, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and two world wars, S&H’s popularity grew steadily.

POSTWAR FAD

Disney’s new live-action movie Cinderella is in theaters now. The story of Cinderella is an old one, with many variants, found all over the world. The root of the story is that a downtrodden, mistreated woman finds love when she is disguised as someone of an upper class. When she goes back to her everyday world, it takes a twist of fate, like a lost shoe, for the prince to recognize the woman he loves among the unwashed masses. In other words, it’s a fairy tales about love overcoming class barriers. In 1893, Marian Roalfe Cox compiled 345 variants of the story in a book. Some of them went by different names, but you’d recognize the basic premise in any of them. One of the folktales, from Italy, would be hard to film.

In this version of the story, the heroine is born inside a gourd and accidentally abandoned in the forest — understandable, given that her mother has just brought forth a squash from within her person, and the last thought she's entertaining is probably, "Hey, I'll take that with me."

Our heroine is discovered by a prince, who finds the talking gourd and takes it home. If nothing else, perhaps it has a future in show business. At some point, she presumably emerges from it — the details offered in the book about this particular folk tale are limited — and she becomes a servant. The prince keeps her at the palace but mistreats her terribly, even beating her and kicking her to prevent her from attending his ball, but she gets there anyway without his knowing it's her (which is one reason it seems certain she's out of the squash by now). They meet and he gives her gifts and so on. Later, when she prepares his breakfast in the guise of his once-ensquashed servant, she slips into the breakfast the gifts he gave her at the ball when they danced. When he finds jewelry in his food, he realizes she is his beloved, and they get married. Ah, the classic "boy meets gourd."

The name of the heroines in that story is Zucchettina. Really. An article at NPR goes on to tease other odd versions of the old folktale, and then deconstructs the many modern versions of Cinderella (and there are more than you were aware of). The more modern adaptations try to inject a little more feminism (and less violence) into the story, but the impenetrable class divisions in the basic premise work best when the story is set in the past. You’ll learn more than you ever thought there was to know about the classic fairy tale at NPR.

(Image credit: Jonathan Olley/Disney)

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Valerie C. posted about her pet duck Spuck, who loves and misses her.

So I have a pet duck who is special needs. I saved Spuck from being culled as a duckling and he imprinted on me, but I go to college on the other side of the country. This was my duck’s reaction after seeing me for the first time in 4 months

That’s a good duck, Spuck. -via Daily Picks and Flicks