Category Archives: culture

culture, Well Thank God for THAT

Well Thank God for THAT: Thunderwear

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So, this comes to us from the file of things you didn’t even know you needed: Thunderwear! What is Thunderwear, you ask? Obviously, it is underwear with a built-in holster for your gun. Well, I guess technically it is a holster that you wear under your pants, but over your underwear. But, that assumes that you actually own and wear underwear, and I don’t like to make assumptions about my readers. You know what happens when you assume!

On the Thunderwear website, the filename for this photo is actually “happy.jpg.” Insert “is that a ___ in your pocket . . .” joke here.

Anyway, I wanted to draw attention to this product, because most of this blog’s readers are probably academics, and the current wave of gun-lobby insanity is for states to allow concealed weapons to be carried at universities. Or, more specifically, to require universities to allow concealed weapons on campus. I believe that Utah has already passed such a law, and legislation has been proposed in a number of other states, including Texas and Arizona. So, next time a student comes in to argue about their grade on a test, you’ll be ready.

Pretty cool, but I’m going to wait for the one that I can customize with the name of my sorority across the backside. 

The site also provides testimonials. Here, by far, is the best one:

“I have been wearing it tonight with the P230 and it works fine. Tried it out at dinnertime in jeans & a t -shirt, neither wife nor kids were the wiser. thanks.” A.P Los Angeles CA.

No, indeed, they were not.

Books, culture, media, poetry

Grass und Gaga – Im Ei

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So, here’s something you probably already know, but wish you didn’t. Lady Gaga showed up at the Grammy Awards last night in an outfit that, in evolutionary terms, represents a sort of neoteny relative to the meat dress she was sporting at the MTV Video Music Awards. Here she is arriving. She’s the one you can’t see, because she is inside the egg.

Lady Gaga is carried inside an egg by four of her muscular servants, who are so poorly paid that two of them can not even afford shirts. Later, the slave-mistress would mount the egg and let out guttural screams until the singer emerged, soaked in amniotic fluid. At least, I am assuming that is what happened. Image via CBS News.

But really, I just wanted to use this as an excuse to share a poem that I love. It is by Günter Grass, and is probably a reasonable approximation of what Lady Gaga was muttering to herself in a Gollum-like rasp while contemplating which of her servants she would consume first. The difference is that she would no doubt be muttering in the original German, whereas I am presenting you with an English translation, taken here from the 1977 bilingual edition of In the Egg and Other Poems. The English translation of this poem was done by Michael Hamburger.

Enjoy!

In The Egg

We live in the egg.
We have covered the inside wall
of the shell with dirty drawings
and the Christian names of our enemies.
We are being hatched.

Whoever is hatching us
is hatching our pencils as well.
Set free from the egg one day
at once we shall make an image
of whoever is hatching us.

We assume that we’re being hatched.
We imagine some good-natured fowl
and write school essays
about the colour and breed
of the hen that is hatching us.

When shall we break the shell?
Our prophets inside the egg
for a middling salary argue
about the period of incubation.
They posit a day called X.

Out of boredom and genuine need
we have invented incubators.
We are much concerned with our offspring inside the egg.
We should be glad to recommend our patent
to her who looks after us.

But we have a roof over our heads.
Senile chicks,
polyglot embryos
chatter all day
and even discuss their dreams.

And what if we’re not being hatched?
If this shell will never break?
If our horizon is only that
of our scribbles, and always will be?
We hope that we’re being hatched.

Even if we only talk of hatching
there remains the fear that someone
outside our shell will feel hungry
and crack us into the frying pan with a pinch of salt.
What shall we do then, my brethren inside the egg?

culture, media, Politics

Dissent among Philippine separatist MILFs

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So, here is a story that proves the old adage that everything is funny in translation.

Apparently, the government of the Philippines has entered into talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has been fighting to establish an independent Islamic state for nearly thirty years, since it split from the less-insurgency-minded Moro National Liberation Front. But now, some of the more militant MILFs are splitting from that group.

It’s the same moral that we’ve seen in every other installment of the Real Housewives franchise: some MILFs don’t even want to get along.

culture, media, Well Thank God for THAT

Well Thank God for THAT: 24 The Fragrance

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So, remember how just the other day you were saying that you wished you could smell like a blend of gunpowder, blood, and moral relativism? Well, you’re in luck! Park Fragrance has introduced a new fragrance just for you: 24.

If you’re a big fan of torture porn, you’ve probably seen the TV show 24. For the rest of you, it’s the one where Kiefer Sutherland assembles an action-packed argument justifying the abandonment of all principles when dealing with one’s enemies.

24™ toilet water.  Not just for waterboarding!

There are two “24” eaux de toilette: Classic and Gold. Classic has a “blend of bergamot, lemon, mandarin, and orange.” It is “masculine and self assured,” just like you were that time you were working over Earl Grey with a pair of pliers in a citrus grove. It is “quickly [sic] underpinned by a spicy oriental core.” Just like a North Korean nuclear facility!

Gold is for both men and women and “opens with emotions of vibrancy created by notes of jasmine, sandalwood, amber, and vanilla.” Gold is “precious and captivating,” recapitulating the show’s characters and most overused plot device, respectively.

culture, music, Reflected Glory, video

Reflected Glory: Picture Songs

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So, we all know that you, Cathy, and Garfield all Hate Mondays. But that’s probably just because you haven’t been watching Nice Peter’s Picture Songs. They’re songs. That he writes about pictures. Every monday. I honestly don’t know how he does this every week, especially since he appears to do other things. Here is last week’s:

And links to some previous editions:

Old, Shiny, Awesome

Really Really Bad Day

Nom Nom Nom Nom, Babies!

Enjoy!

Behavior, biology, culture, journal club, math, science, scientific misconduct

Mathematicians and Mongeese: Peeing to Defend Territory? or Mates?

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So, you may have heard about Tihomir Petrov, the math professor at Cal State, Northridge who was arrested for urinating on his colleague’s office door. Campus security got video footage of Petrov in the act when they set up video cameras following the discovery of “puddles of what they thought was urine.”

You may be asking yourself, what the heck was this dude thinking? How should we interpret the behavior of this Homo mathematicus (not that there’s anything wrong with it) specimen?

What Professor Petrov was probably thinking.

Fortunately, once again, Science!™ has an answer for you. Urine is commonly used as a scent marker to deter competitors. But deter them from what? Traditionally, it has been assumed that scent marking is primarily used to defend territory against intruders, thereby safeguarding resources such as food and space. However, some recent studies have suggested that scent marking may be used to defend mates and mating opportunities. One of the difficulties in studying such a question, however, is that in many systems, competitors for territory and competitors for mates are the same individuals.

A recent study by a group of researchers in the UK, Uganda, and Switzerland have attempted to separate out these two forms of competition in a study of the wild banded mongoose. This species lives in large social groups that share a territory. Thus territorial competition occurs primarily between different social groups, whereas competition over mates occurs primarily within groups.

“Anal gland secretion (AGS) and urine samples were collected under anaesthesia during routine trapping events”  Image licensed under creative commons from Mike Rohde’s Flickr photostream.

The researchers found that the mongoose populations marked uniformly throughout their territory, and did not appear to increase the frequency of marking in those regions where two territories overlapped. This suggests that, in this species at least, defense of mates and mating opportunities represents a major contribution to scent-marking behavior, perhaps more so than territorial defense.

So, can we extrapolate from the behavior of the wild banded mongoose to the behavior of wild banded mathematician Tihomir Petrov? Of course we can! Should we extrapolate? Absolutely not! But, here at Lost in Transcription, we’re all about the possible, so here is the take-home message. Castle and Beckett should look beyond professional disputes between the two mathematicians. They need to be looking at the love-triangle angle (Love angle4?) for motive.

Alternate theory: As Northridge is, like, the pr0n capital of the country, Petrov might not have been the original urinator. When he saw that the cameras had been set up, he might have assumed that he had been cast in a movie, and that peeing on the floor was what was expected of him. Just sayin’.

Jordan, N., Mwanguhya, F., Kyabulima, S., Rüedi, P., & Cant, M. (2010). Scent marking within and between groups of wild banded mongooses Journal of Zoology, 280 (1), 72-83 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.2009.00646.x

Behavior, culture

Naming Advice for New Parents

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So, you’re having a baby. There’s one rule, really. Are you listening?

Don’t give your kid the middle name “Lee.”

Here’s the latest “*Lee*” in the news, Ricky Lee Kalichun:

from the Evansville Courier & Press, via Geekologie

Broke into ex-roommate’s apartment. To get back his video games. With a sword.

He was wearing a camouflage jacket, and camouflaged his face as well, with a marker. Maybe he was hoping to be mistaken for one of Jesse James’s girlfriends.

Now, I’m glad that your Grampa Lee was a World War II hero and all, but, really, just – just don’t.

culture, Hemiscience, Sports

Can you spell scrappy without crappy?

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So, I’m among those who believe that a baseball player only gets a reputation for being “scrappy” if they are not very good. You only get called scrappy if you scramble around and smother a ground ball that a fielder with better range would have gotten to easily. (I’m looking at you, David Eckstein.)

I decided to address this question by collecting some data that really has nothing to do with the original question. Using a method similar to that used by the Negative Log Google Naked Ratiometer, I looked at each position to see how often the position was referred to as “scrappy” and how often it was referred to as “crappy.”

For example, the Log Scrappiness for second basemen is calculated by taking the logarithm (base 10) of the number of google hits for “scrappy second baseman” divided by the number of hits for just “second baseman.” Similarly for Log Crappiness. Positions are more often referred to as “crappy” if they are higher on the graph. They are more often “scrappy” if they are further to the right.

If we look at the infielders and outfielders separately, the positions fall close to two straight lines with similar slopes.[1] Within each group, the relative scrappinesses are more or less what you might expect. The interesting thing is that each group has an inverse relationship between scrappiness and crappiness.[2] The scrappier a position is, the less crappy it is.

The solid diagonal line is the iso-(s)crapocline, or the line indicating equal scrappiness and crappiness. First basemen (1B), left fielders (LF), and right fielders (RF) are crappier than they are scrappy. Third basemen (3B), shortstops (SS), second basemen (2B), and center fielders (CF) are more scrappy than crappy.

Pitchers and catchers were left off, since there is too much cross talk on Google with non-baseball uses.

But, let’s get back to the original question: “Can you spell scrappy without crappy?” One answer is, “Yes, if you spell it in Albanian.” Via Google Translate: you can definitely spell i copëzuar without i mutit.

—————————————————————————————-

[1] You may have noticed that these straight lines represent power laws. If I were a physicist, I would say something about universality classes, and publish this blog post in Physical Review E.[3]

[2] This seems to violate the assertion I made at the beginning of the entry, but the right way to do address that question would actually be to look at how often “scrappy” is used to describe individual players, and then to compare this to an objective measure of crappiness, based on player statistics.

[3] Oh, SNAP!

culture, media, poetry, science, Well Thank God for THAT

Well Thank God for THAT: Mr. Peabody and Sherman headed to the big screen

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So, what do you do with the two guys who wrote the screenplay for Yogi Bear, which was filmed in approximately three too many dimensions and made as much money as sense? Well, if you’re Dreamworks, you pay them to make another fifty-year-old cartoon into a movie. Or rather, a cartoon that was part of another cartoon. And then you cast Robert Downey Jr. as a dog. Presumably because his complete lack of talent complements the complete lack of creativity at the studio.

Following similar logic, I assume that the soundtrack will be composed by feeding beans to a room full of monkeys.

The movie will be based on Peabody’s Improbable History, which was a regular feature on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. In it, Mr. Peabody, a bespectacled dog-genius, and his sidekick, Sherman, a bespectacled boy-not-genius, use the WABAC machine to travel back in time and visit famous historical events.

The historical events in question unfold in humorous ways.

To be fair, this was the second best segment on the show, after Bullwinkle reading poetry. But still, why would Dreamworks do this? With real money that could have been better spent feeding the poor, or, if we’re honest, teaching the poor Esperanto?

Here’s the good news. Director Rob Minkoff says,

Mr. Peabody is this genetic anomaly. He does have brothers and sisters, all of them non-speaking, no[n] super-smart dogs. He’s an outcast, but has overcome it by being so great at so many things.

So yay, genetics, presumably in the form of a mutation at FOXP2, or that X-Men locus. And overcoming the adversity of being a genius – through the “being so great at so many things.”

The other good news? At the time of this writing, at least, Ed isn’t in it.