Pandora's Litter Box: The Training of the Human

(This post is dedicated to my fuzzy butt kitty, who definitely had me trained.)

The June 2009 issue¹ of Scientific American has an article titled "The Taming of the Cat." After reading the article, not to mention living with cats my whole life, I really think it would have been more accurate to call it "The Training of the Human." It really gives the impression that humans didn't domesticate cats as much as the cats just kind of decided to move in. "Well, there are mice over there and the humans seem too stupid to catch them. They also throw out all the good parts of the big animals they eat. They're pretty dumb, but they don't seem too bad overall, although the smaller versions are much scarier than the big ones, always shrieking and running and pulling our tails. Ouch! Ok, time for some claw-point corporal punishment! Teach you to do that again!"

And according to Heather, that's pretty much how Pandora showed up at Heather'n'Dave's, a filthy, undersized, 5-month-old ball of fur. (She was, at that time, one of the ugliest cats I had ever seen. She grew into one of the most beautiful.) Her appearance was so mysterious, I thought of her as being sui generis, the result of spontaneous generation. If any creature could will herself into being, Pandora was it.

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¹Which I have finished, which means I am on the July issue and it's still July! Of course, I probably won't actually finish the July issue in July, and of course the August issue has already arrived, but at least I'm almost caught up!

Pandora's Litter Box: My Highly-Specialized Lobe-Finned Fish

For reasons which now elude me (oh, I remember now¹), I ended up perusing the wikipedia article on tetrapods. While discussing classification of various tetrapoda (Greek for "four-legged critters") throughout various geologic periods, the article throws out the note, "Each of these lineages, however, remains grouped with the tetrapoda, just as Homo sapiens could be considered a very highly-specialized kind of lobe-finned fish."

As Pandora was draped across my lap (part of the reason I was perusing wikipedia articles at nearly 2 in the morning -- she was too cute to disturb), it struck me that she is just as much a highly-specialized lobe-finned fish as I am. I suspect that will be my new pet name for her, replacing the current favorite of Ms Fuzzy Pants ("Ms Pants" for short).

Added: Things I would have mentioned originally had I actually been awake when I posted.

• Green Dam's full name is "Green Dam Youth Escort." The Chinese government claims the software is necessary to keep their youth clean ("green") from exposure to pornography, except, well, that's not all the Great Firewall of China is blocking at the moment, is it? The computer's user also has no way of finding out which sites are on the software's internal (and remotely update-able) black list.
• American PC makers Dell and HP⁶ still have not agreed to pre-install the software, although they also haven't categorically refused to do so. There are plenty of places you can go to sign petitions telling them not to cave in. You can find one here, complete with a typo in the first line of the message. (I'm sending them an email right now to tell them to, oh, send another set of eyes over those things before posting syntactically incorrect notices in an attempt to change the world.)
  
• Spoon is not so much a highly-specialized lobe-finned fish as he is a highly-chubby lobe-butted cat.

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¹How I ended up reading the wikipedia article on tetrapods:

1. This article on "Green Dam," China's software for Windows PCs that would allow them to restrict and spy on their citizens' Internet usage with greater ease than their border firewalls do today², had a "Most Popular in Science" sidebar, where...
2. ... this article on the long-beaked echidna was #3! Take a look at that picture and tell me that's not some creature out of Doctor Who! Anyway, the long-beaked echidna is, with the short-nosed echidna and our wacky pal the platypus, one of three surviving monotremes, extremely archaic mammals. I was trying to figure out where they (or we) branched off in the mammalian family tree, so I started poking around to see if I could find an actual, well, pictorial family tree. That's when I came across
3. The Tree of Life Web Project, and working backwards from the Mammalia page, hit the terrestrial vertebrate ("Stegocephalians") page, and
4. Actually, I'm really tired, but moving even one limb lower on the tree came up with a lovely picture of our wacky, great-great-...-great-great-aunt, the ovoviviparous coelacanth, and I said, "That's wacky!" (it was really late, but not as late as it is now). Anyway, you and I and great-aunt Coel³ there are all sarcopterygians, so deal with it.

²Note the NY Times article nowhere mentions that the software is Windows-specific. Those goddamned Apple (Steve Jobs is seriously the antichrist, and no, your only other computer choice is not Bill Gates) commercials aside, I see "PC" and my brain automatically assumes that, were I given access to the box, Linux and/or FreeBSD would be installed on the thing forthwith. Vista even makes it easy to shrink existing partitions so you can have space for another OS without needing third-party disk management software! Does the Chinese government also block sites from which one can download Linux or FreeBSD? Because you can put all the nasty software on the Windows partition that you want, and it's not going to matter if you're running another fucking operating system.^4
3I actually have a (twice-over) great-aunt Ceil, although I actually have no idea how she spells her name. (I'm guessing.)⁷ But she doesn't look like that great-aunt Coel, at least no more than you or I or Pandora.
⁴Yes, I'm cranky. Just because you may have to water a few things down (notice I did not say "dumb down") to make science writing digestible by a nonspecialized audience doesn't mean you, the writer, have a right to be, well, dumb. The absence of mention of a specific OS actually confused me further, because then I had to start wondering if they were confusing "software" with "firmware" and meant the filtering took place at the hardware level. I had to look up Green Dam elsewhere to figure it out.^5
5Note that if I didn't believe Intelligent Design was created by morons, I probably would have been in bed an hour ago.
⁶Smack yourself if you saw that and immediately thought "Harry Potter."
⁷Answered: I asked my mother and it's "Cile."

Other: Why I Get the Hiccups

Answer: Because my great-great-great-...-great grandma was a frog.

The January issue of Scientific American, through which I am more than halfway, celebrates the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial (evil word -- I get confused by any Latin numerical prefix after "bi-") of the publication of On the Origin of Species, which, of course, first laid out his then-theory of evolution. (Important note: By real scientists, evolution is a scientific law or fact, no longer considered a "theory," which has a different meaning scientifically than it does colloquially anyway. An explanation of a phenomenon cannot be called a theory in academic circles unless it already has a strong, factual underlying basis with no obvious, provable flaws. I have no patience for the ignorance demonstrated when opponents of evolution assume the word "theory" means someone was pulling random ideas out of their ass to explain how living beings got the way they were and that the explanation has no existing proof. See also "Evolution as theory and fact.")

Ahem. The article "This Old Body" discusses scrotum-related hernias, which I have no knowledge of and find it unlikely that I will ever experience first-hand, and, well, the hiccups, as by-products of our evolution from fish and amphibians.

I can get the hiccups when I get a serious case of the giggles. I don't think it happens as often as it did when I was a kid, but it still pops up from time to time. It drives me nuts. They are very loud hiccups which can wrack my body to the point of pain. Fortunately, while the incidents usually seem interminable, they will usually disappear within 15 minutes or less. I've tried all the folk remedies, such as breathing in paper bags, holding my breath, drinking water, or having someone try to scare them out of me. (I don't recommend doing the last two simultaneously. One time when I was a kid, I was visiting my aunt. I was sitting, drinking some water to try to get rid of the things, when my grandmother came up behind me and shouted, "Boo!" She hadn't realized I was drinking water, and the water spewed out. And I still had the hiccups.)

One contributing factor involves the nerves that control the diaphragm. They take a very circuitous route to get there, a legacy of the time when we had gills on the sides of our necks. Instead of becoming more centralized as the muscle used to control breathing moved down our torso, the phrenic nerves now pass either side of the heart. The other major factor involves the glottis. Tadpoles use the glottis to prevent the water that flows across their gills from getting into their lungs. Basically they control their breath by hiccuping. Put the two together, and the disruption of the phrenic nerve signals to the diaphragm by various means (generally laughing in my case, although occasionally carbonated drinks will do it) causes the diaphragm to spasm, creating an abrupt intake of air on each contraction, which causes the epiglottis to close.

The author also gets points for mentioning knitting, although it's in relation to the bones and cartilage of our hands, the underlying basis of which came from our piscine ancestors. We pay the price for the fine control of these adapted features with the possibility of certain injuries caused by performing movements they hadn't originally been designed to handle and haven't completely evolved to handle.

Anyone who argues that such a jury-rigged body constitutes an "intelligent design" doesn't sound too bright to me.

Riding the Rails: Day 3 Darwin In Action

... Day 3 continued ...

Our guide for the Winchester Mystery House Mansion Tour turned out to be a 12-year-old boy. Ok, I should be talking, since I look a fair deal younger than I am, so I'll give him a little credit and say he's 15, but not a day over. He had the script down, though, and could deliver it at about 120 miles-per-hour. He talked so fast that we ended up having to wait multiple times for the group ahead of us to move, and he wasn't even trying to rush us physically. You could tell as soon as he was asked a non-FAQ and had to go off the script. He stopped the sing-song recitation and started speaking at a more normal speed, interjecting the word "like" every sixth word or so. I don't mean to imply he seemed bored with his job or anything, because I didn't get that impression.

I'm not going to describe the house much, except to say that Sarah Winchester was rather crazy and also should not have been acting as her own architect. Also, if you ever go on the tour, particularly if it's the least bit cool outside, bring something warm to wear. I couldn't figure out why some parts of the house were so chilly, then it dawned on me. A lot of exterior walls had no insulation whatsoever. There was just the one layer of wood boards.

While there were many lovely stained glass windows and a number of oddities, the thing I will never forgot about the tour is Olivia. No, Olivia was not a Winchester, and she's not a ghost at the house. Well, not yet, anyway. Olivia was a little girl, maybe 3 years old, on the tour. I know her name quite well because her parents were forever saying, "Olivia, come here. Don't run ahead, Olivia. Come back here to mommy and daddy, Olivia."

Let me explain two things here. The first one is what I call "Darwin In Action," sort of my personal version of the Darwin Awards. Bus Person Car is one variation. However, I've seen some parents allow if not encourage ("hey, kid, let's jaywalk in the middle of the block here on this busy street after dark!" -- seen it) their young children to attempt to take themselves out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, that would rarely solve the problem, as the parents are generally not placing their own further reproductive abilities at risk. Who knows, maybe there's some "Bad Seed" action here I don't know about it. I may be flip about it, but it would really piss me off if I had to witness something predictably horrible actually coming to fruition.

The second thing: the Winchester Mystery House can be dangerous if a person doesn't pay attention to where they're going. Someone not paying attention can damage something old and irreplaceable, get lost, or trip and fall and seriously injure themselves. This is most definitely not a place where you'd want a 3-year-old darting around out of sight of her parents. Well, unless you were her parents and you somehow weren't too averse to the idea of losing her.

Except that was exactly how Olivia's parents were acting. They were taking turns carrying an infant who was about 12-months old. This presumably would have left the hands of the other parent free to, oh, I don't know, hold on to Olivia. But, no, the kid kept skittering between people without looking where she was going, bumping into them, scaring the hell out of me when I was bumped in the knee not because I thought it was a ghost, but because I was picturing what my prison sentence would be like if I went to the root of the problem and throttled her dumbass parents.

So, while they would be calling out, "Olivia, come back here," in a completely unthreatening, "there aren't really any repercussions if you don't come back here because we're the type of parents who don't believe in really punishing our children, because we're dumbasses who want to raise good-for-nothings with a limitless sense of entitlement or even just total sociopaths, and then we seem bewildered when we end up on a nanny reality TV show," Olivia usually didn't pay much attention, and neither of the parents made an effort to go get her and keep a hold on her. They were also pretty oblivious when the baby they were holding would reach over her parent's shoulder and try to grab at the priceless, earthquake-damaged, "please don't lean on the walls" wallpaper, which was actually within her short little arm's reach. I realize little kids are into everything and it can be easy to lose track sometimes, but that's not really an excuse not to try to keep them out of anything they shouldn't be doing.

Finally, about 50 minutes into the 65-minute tour, Olivia had run ahead of the guide, and we could see her through a glass wall as she went around a corner and just kept on going ahead. At this point the mother told the father, "I'm going to go grab her hand." I would have seriously considered banging my head against the wall if it hadn't been covered in priceless wallpaper.

Somehow, Olivia got out of the house alive, when the house could so easily have added a brand new ghost to its collection. Darwin must have been busy elsewhere.

I really should have put something about "regular child-free tours" in the suggestion box in the gift shop. Instead I bought Brad a snow-globe magnet (I seriously doubt it has actually snowed on the house itself more than about half a dozen times in 125 years) for feeding the fuzzies in my absence. Then I walked back to the catch the same bus that had gotten me there so I could go further west to the San Jose Kinokuniya. I had to wait forever for the bus, and this stop didn't have a bench. Whine.

to be continued some more....