(Image credit: Image credit: Flickr user francesca!!)
Got milk? Well, you wouldn't if it weren't for these world-churning events.
MILK
You can't spell "milk production" without g-o-a-t-s. Well, technically you could, ..but not historically. Goats were most likely the first dairy animals ever domesticated. Archeological evidence suggests that ancient peoples in what is now Iran and Iraq were selectively breeding these four-legged eating machines as far back as 8,000-9,000 B.C.E. And, while they may not look like much to us modern Americans, the logic behind goat keeping is impeccable. Small, sturdy, and able to eat just about anything you put in front of them, they're easier creatures to keep healthy, happy, and milk-producing (particularly in cool, mountainous climates) than their larger relatives like cows and sheep. Several breeds have hair that can be shorn and used for clothing. And, like all milk animals, they're an excellence nutritional value for what you have to put in.
Ruminants, the class of animals from which humans get all their dairy products, have a gigantic four-chambered stomach that allows them to happily digest dry stalks, fibrous vines, and leaves that other animals (humans included) write off as inedible. Their secret: lots and lots of chewing, in addition to partial digestion and regurgitation, then more chewing, followed by a healthy dose of specialized tummy bacteria. Unlike, say, pigs, which eat basically the same food as people and are only useful as meat, ruminants don't compete with their owners for sustenance. Further, the milk they produce over several years provides far more nutrition than the meat a single animal could ever hope to put out. In fact, it only takes a couple of goats to keep a whole family of people fed for a year.
The extinct auroch.
As the concept of domesticating and milking animals spread from the Middle East, farmers adopted local beasts as their milk-giving ruminant of choice. Depending on things like climate, geography, and population, various regions favored yaks, buffalo, cows, and sheep. All have their own special adaptations that make them better for certain environments and needs. Cows, for instance, were domesticated from long-horned wild aurochs around the same time and place as goats. Since at least 3,000 B.C.E. they've been bred primarily for their milk, which is richer than goats' and due to their size, more abundant. However, as heavy eaters with a grass diet, cows really work best in temperate climates. Modern European cows are much smaller than their auroch ancestors, primarily because in captivity, the winter food supply was far less abundant. There is one notable exception to the ruminant rule, however: the camel. The only milkable domesticated animal that isn't a ruminant, camels were particularly adapted to arid, desert regions, and as such, their milk has been a staple food in parts of Africa since 2500 B.C.E.
Ottawa artist Dan Austin makes awesome robots out of old appliances and other recycled bits of this and that. On the left is Kenmore, who is built from a floor polisher and a flower pot, among other things. On the right is Hunter, who is a 6-foot tall floor lamp! His "tentacles" are actually adjustable lights. You can also meet Betsy, Norm-Al, Bell, Bolivar, the Kaiser-Bots, and more in Austin's Flickr set. Link-Thanks, Vivian!
Jason Pitts asked Lianna to the prom during third period class last week in an romantic way that made me smile from ear to ear. The lyrics are available at the YouTube link. -via Buzzfeed
This snake takes a pretty picture! The Ruby-Eyed Green Pit Viper (Cryptelytrops rubeus) is a newly-discovered species that lives near Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and in Cambodia. National Geographic has more picture of the snake, including its attempt to eat an entire frog that's as big as the snake. Link-Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
The uncanny valley is about to get creepier, thanks to this realistic-looking animatronic eye developed by Dan Thomson of Visionary Effects. Will this be used for movie effects, Disneyland presidents, artificial girlfriends, or working robots? Maybe all of those things! -via Laughing Squid
Now this is strange. When you write on word processing software, online or not, you can justify, align left, align right, or center your text. But why center your text when you can centaur it? That's exactly what this generator does. Paste in your block of text -you have to paste a lot of words, so you may have to repeat yourself to see how it works- and then his the centaur button at the bottom. Voila! Your text is then centaured correctly! Link -via The Daily What
The estate at Witley Park in Britain has been a private home and a public facility at different times. What is visible above ground is nice enough, but the secret underground and underwater construction is a treasure. Deep passages lead to the rumored "ballroom under the lake", which, as it turns out, was originally built as a billiard room, but it wasn't the only glassed-in room. Guests can watch fish swim around them -or they could at one time or another. Link -via Metafilter
Also see: more pictures at Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybergibbons/sets/72057594107271287/with/128621401/
Stephen put a lot of hard work into studying a "a particular cardiac arrhythmia" for his PhD. He is deservedly proud of achieving his diploma, but wanted something more interesting to display on his wall. This artwork is made up of words from his dissertation. Cool! Link -via reddit
Have you been to NeatoBambino lately? The new Decipher the Doodle contest is up, in which you have a chance to win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop by examining a drawing by a 4-year-old and figuring out what it is supposed to mean. You can win with the first correct interpretation (according to the 4-year-old), or you can win for the most entertaining but wrong answer. Only a portion of the doodle is shown here. Link
It's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Great guesses win prizes!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Update: The first correct answer came from Blake. This is a truth window {wiki}, built into a wall of a house to show what the wall is made of (straw, in this case). Read more about them at the What Is It? blog. The funniest answer came from Iago, who said it was Rumpelstilskin's personal wall safe. Ha! Both winners get t-shirts from the NeatoShop. But you really should read all the comments because we had a ton of funny answers!
by Ron E. Hassner, University of California, Berkeley
Figure 1. A specimen of Heliconius erato. The Lorenz butterfly may be a member of this species.
Here is the most complete record yet compiled of the travels of the Lorenz butterfly.
The most famous butterfly in science made its first reported appearance in 1972, in a paper on chaos theory presented by Edward Lorenz to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.1 In the paper, Lorenz presented a cornerstone argument of chaos theory: very small differences in initial conditions can lead to large effects in complex systems. He entitled the paper with an appropriate example, calling it, “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
Lorenz’s butterfly has since appeared in every conceivable reference to chaos theory. Yet despite its meteoric rise to fame, chaos theorists soon lost track of the butterfly’s whereabouts.
Reported Sightings In 1987, James Gleick rediscovered Lorenz’s butterfly and announced triumphantly that “a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”2 Gleick could not explain when or why the butterfly had moved to Peking, of all places, why it should suddenly shift its attention from tornadoes in Texas to storm systems in New York, or where it had been in the intervening fifteen years. But in 1992, five years after Gleick’s discovery, the butterfly returned to Brazil—specifically to Rio de Janeiro—where it was spotted by Denny Gulick.3
Figure 2. Global movements of Lorenz’s butterfly.
At this point, the sightings grew more frequent. In 1993, the blockbuster movie Jurassic Park located the insect in Beijing. Two years after that, several scientists reported, in this journal, seeing the subject in Lausanne, Switzerland.4 In 1996, Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan found it frolicking in France, and immediately pronounced that “a butterfly flaps its wings in Paris… [which] results in a hurricane in Miamii.”5 The year after that, the butterfly returned to its previous haunt in China. However, as David Campbell and Gottfried Mayer-Kress were to document, it had focused its attention on the weather in San Francisco.6 Peter Smith confirmed the butterfly’s Chinese location in 1998, by which time its flapping was affecting the climate of South England.7 John B. Arden spotted the butterfly in Venezuela that same year.8
Despite its now advanced age, Lorenz’s butterfly continues to be tracked by chaos theorists. In the year 2000, it was spotted in both the Amazon rain forest and Harrisburg, Virginia.9 By 2001, it had moved to California. From there, it flew to Japan, where Grove, Ladas & Grove located it 2004.10 That same year it appeared once more in Brazil and then returned to China in 2006.11
Figure 3. The mathematical pattern known as the Lorenz attractor.
Discussion The longevity and traveling speed of the famed butterfly have occasioned some dispute about its identity. The butterfly is possibly of the species Heliconius erato (also known as the “Red Postman”), famed for its extraordinary longevity (see Figure 3). Common in South America, it has an impressive tornado-inducing wingspan of 2.25 inches.12
Curiously, the pattern of the butterfly’s movements, as plotted on a world map, replicates a pattern that is characteristic of certain systems that exhibit so-called “chaotic” behavior. The tracings in Figure 1 compare easily with those in Figure 3, which shows a mathematical pattern known as the Lorenz attractor. This pattern was named after Edward Lorenz, the very man whose theory had first called attention to this novel branch of lepidoptery. More curiously still, the butterfly shape of the Lorenz attractor resembles none other than the Heliconius erato (compare Figure 3 with Figure 2). The significance or meaning of any of this has yet to be determined.
References 1. The Essence of Chaos, Edward Lorenz, University of Washington Press, 1993, pp. 14–5 and 181–4.
2. Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick, Viking, 1987, p. 8.
3. Encounters with Chaos, Denny Gulick, McGraw Hill, 1992, p. 92.
4. “Experimental Evidence of the Butterfly Effect,” D. Inaudi1, X. Colonna de Lega, A. Di Tullio, C. Forno, P. Jacquot, M. Lehmann, Max Monti, and S. Vurpillot, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 1, no. 6, November–December 1995.
5. Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change, Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan, Blackwell, 1996, pp. 156–7.
6. “Chaos and Politics: Application of Nonlinear Dynamics to Social-Political Issues,” David K. Campbell and Gottfried Mayer-Kres, The Impact of Chaos on Science and Society (Celso Grebogi and James A. York, eds.), 1997, p. 41.
7. Explaining Chaos, Peter Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1.
8. Science, Theology and Consciousness: The Search for Unity, John Boghosian Arden, Praeger, 1998, p. 23.
9. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, Roger Lewin, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 11; Conscious Acts and the Politics of Social Change, Robin L. Teske and Mary Ann Tetreault, University of South Carolina Press, 2000, p. 116.
10. Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World, Ervin Laszlo, Arthur Charles Clarke and Kay Mikel, Berrett-Koehler, 2001, p. 10; Periodicities in Nonlinear Difference Equations, E. A. Grove, Chapman & Hall, 2004, p. 38.
11. The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking, Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird, Springer, 2004, p. xxi; Science and Grace: God’s Reign in the Natural Sciences, Tim Morris and Don Petcher, Crossway Books, 2006, p. 332, note 23.
12. “Longevity Studies in a Tropical Conservatory: Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth?”, John R. Watts, Butterfly Pavilion of Westminster, CO, p. 8, table 2; “Schmetterlinge und Brustwarzen,” L. Arazi, Annals of the German Society for Entomology, vol. 8, no. 2, 1994; “Lifespan of Butterflies,” J. A. Scott, Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, vol. 12, 1973.
Linda Monach has embarked on a culinary adventure and is chronicling it on the blog Burgers Here and There.
A couple of years ago my parents moved in with us to help take care of our daughters as my husband and I juggled two stressful careers. My dad likes simple food and struggles with some of my more adventurous meals. This year, at Father’s day I made him his favorite dinner of hamburgers and pork and beans. That’s when inspiration hit – could I take the beloved burger and make it the vehicle for introducing my dad to new flavors? Indeed, looks like I can!
So, here’s the goal…create one burger recipe for every country in the world.
Monach is not trying to recreate the hamburgers of the world, but trying to put the flavors of the world's traditional cuisines into each hamburger meal. She's got several nations covered so far, all beginning with A. Link -via Metafilter
What is your biggest regret about? A study by Kellogg professor of marketing Neal Roese plotted the results from a telephone survey of 370 American adults and graphed them for our edification. The link has further information on the study besides what's in this graph. Link -via The Daily What
Joe Raciti (previously at Neatorama) took the Double Rainbow Song and adapted it for a choir. Then musician YouTube users collaborated long distance for an "Audio Quilt" version. The result is as lovely as ...a double rainbow! Lyrics, credits, and an iTunes link are available at the YouTube page. -Thanks, Joe!
I wonder if he's any relation to Peter Cetera? This Twaggie illustrates a Tweet from @elibraden. Like all Twaggies, it can be preserved for posterity in a print or t-shirt. Link
