Eels! Again!

Slate has a great piece about the life of an eel, but of course, astute readers of Abstract Citizen (all 2.7 of you!) already knew all about it from this post. Right? RIGHT???

Ex. Tinc. Tion.

From this great New Yorker article about the search for a general theory of extinctions (hint: we may be contributing to the current one – shocking, I know…)

It is difficult to say when, exactly, the current extinction event – sometimes called the sixth extinction – began. What might be thought of as its opening phase appears to have started about fifty thousand years ago. At that time, Australia was home to a fantastic assortment of enormous animals; these included a wombatlike creature the size of a hippo, a land tortoise nearly as big as a VW beetle, and the giant short-faced kangaroo, which grew to be ten feet tall. Then all of the continent’s largest animals disappeared. Every species of marsupial weighing more than two hundred pounds – and there were nineteen of the – vanished….This die-off roughly coincided with the arrival of the first people on the continent, probably from Southeast Asia.

Blue and red: origins

Per Tom Brokaw on Scarborough this morning, NBC created the first electoral map for television for the 1976 election. They had Republicans as blue because they thought that the color blue was more closely associated with the right: blue chips, blue blood, etc. Red, on the other hand, was traditionally the color of leftist parties in Europe, and so they assigned red to the dems.

ABC changed up the scheme for the 1984 election, because they were concerned that they might be accused of trying to imply that democrats were associated with communists. So, the color scheme was reversed, and the other networks followed suit.

The joy of reading...about cooking

Despite my titular abstractness, it is a well know fact that here, at Abstract Citizen HQ, we don't survive on abstractions alone. A smarter and distinctly more German man than I - Bertolt Brecht - wisely had a character say, "Grub first, then ethics." Accordingly, here's a plug for a book that I recently came across.

One of the nice things about knowing a chef is that at some point during our visit, he will pull his most recent food-related books down from the shelf, and we get to come away with a long list of must-buy books. One such book was the Food Lover's Companion, currently in its 4th edition.

It's hard to overstate how much information this book contains. It's like the Norton Anthology of food. Of course, The Joy of Cooking is probably more essential, but I would argue that the Food Lover's Companion should probably take up permanent residence right next to it on your bookshelf.

Set up as a food encyclopedia, the FLC can probably answer any food-related question you might have. And despite the obvious pitfalls of trying to capture this much information in a concise and user-friendly format, the FLC is actually a joy to read - certainly much more so than The Joy of Cooking, which has all the actual joy of a Del Boca Vista salsa class.

The writing is crisp, with just the right amount of literary license. Anyone who has tried to describe flavors or odors in more than a passing way knows how hard this can be. Imagine describing a color without making references to other objects - how would you describe the color blue without referencing the sky? Flavor is sort of like that to me. Even really intelligent people on the teevee - your Bourdains, your Colicchios, your America's Test Kitcheners - fall into linguistic ruts, often repeating simlar variations of a stock phrase to describe flavors. (Colicchio: "This is under-seasoned" or, its corollary, "This was perfectly seasoned." Bourdain: "You know why this _____ is so good? It was made by someone who spent their entire adult life doing nothing but making ____.") Describing flavors with precision and originality is so hard that the existence of a fifth flavor category, which was only relatively recently established - umami - is often rendered as "tastiness."

Compare our general vagueness as a species to the entry for "martini" in the FLC - which tells you that the drink probably descends from the Martinez, created in the eponymously named city in California, and that it therefore belongs to the Manhattan family tree. But most elegantly,it tells you that over time, martinis have become drier and that this "replaces its predecessor's slight sweetness with an icy austerity." The entry for "mulligatawny soup" tells you that the name of the soup derives from the Tamil word for "pepper water." And the entry for "peppadew" tells you that these peppers are "purported to be the first new fruit introduced to the world since the kiwi's debut some thirty years ago."

The appendices include a pasta glossary, a wealth of technical information ranging from nutritional data to metric conversions and smoke-points for different kinds of oil, and lots more. So, don't sit around wondering what a "weakfish" is. Go get this book and find out.

cell phones and cancer

A well-regarded oncology center encourages its employees to act preventively and limit cell phone use, especially for children.

Drunkard and Tipsy...

...as in, the names of George Washington's two foxhounds: "Drunkard" and "Tipsy."

"I shall please"

From Jerome Groopman's excellent (and highly readable) The Anatomy of Hope, a very elegant etymological summation and a note about the shift in how the use of placebos is understood by researchers:

The term "placebo," I learned from articles on the subject, is Latin for "I shall please" and is derived from the Catholic vesper service for the dead. In the past, paid mourners would participate in the service to pacify the grieving family.

Later he adds:

The inert placebo was meant to mute the background noise of the body processes, the random and supposedly meaningless oscillations that occur in our physiology. The outcome among the placebo-treated control patients was judged as the zero baseline and subtracted from the observed effects of the true therapy.

Recently, though, a number of scientists have questioned the assumption that placebos were inactive, contending that they have significant biological effects and...provide one of the clearest windows into the nexus between mind and body, particularly on how belief and expectation may affect pain and physical debility.

Decisions, decisions

I can see this being spun as a "civilization and its discontents" kind of thesis. The gist is that the amount of stressful decisions we make depletes our ability to exercise self-control in other areas. So, if you spend all day making tough decisions at work, you will be less likely to go home and force yourself to make healthy decisions. And that is a result of the fact that decision-making is depleting, and using up all your energy making choices means that you've exhausted your self-regulatory resources.

My friend Doughboy, who just called from Thailand yesterday, once said the following to me in a Home Depot, as we stared at a wall jampacked with more types of brackets than we had ever seen before:

"Right now, I wish we lived in one of those peon countries where you are given a government-issued bracket, and you just need to make that thing fit."

I'm not sure if I remember that statement because of his use of the word "peon" or if it's because I was relieved that he - a handy guy who should be comfortable in a Home Depot - was as befuddled as I was.

In any case, there you have it. Whenever possible, try not to be The Decider.

Sea snakes

Says Trevor Corson:

How eels themselves have sex has been the subject of great curiosity. No one ever saw them mating. Aristotle concluded that they spontaneously arose from mud. A Greek naturalist society in the second century AD decided that eel sex must involve a lot of rubbing, and that mucous must be the eels' sexual fluid. Sigmund Freud's first assignment in medical school was to discover where eels hid their testicles. He couldn't find them.

In the 1890s, European scientists came closer to solving the mystery of eel sex by studginy 'glass eels.' Glass eels are miniature, oceangoing eels. They are transparent and look like little shard of glass. The scientists discovered that glass eels are actually just baby freshwater eels. Mysteriously, the glass eels all seemed to be swimming toward Europe from some distant point in the sea.

An obsessed Danish biologist named Johannes Schmidt launched expedition after expedition, sailing deeper into the Atlantic on each journey. The glass eels he caught were smaller and younger the farther he went. In 1922, after eighteen years, he finally discovered where they were all coming from: the Bermuda Triangle.

As far as scientists can tell, all American and European freshwater eels are born in or near the seaweed-filled Sargasso Sea, in the Bermuda Triangle. After hatching, the baby eels leave the Sargasso and start swimming. They don't stop until they reach their destination. That desintation could be a river in Iowa or a river in Germany. The journey to Europe can take a glass eel two or three years to complete. Relative to body size, it's the equivalent of a human swimming to the moon.

Asian eels do the same thing, except in the Pacific. They're all born at one place in the Philippine Sea, and from there they journey to rivers all over Asia.

Adult eels live in their freshwaer homes for eight to ten years, some much longer. They eat until their bodies contain nearly 30 percent fat, and toward the end of their lives they slither back to the sea to mate.

As they leave freshwater, their digestive systems dissolve and disappear. They will never eat again. Like salmon, they survive by digesting their own fat, and after that, their own muscle protein. Scientists assume that they return to the Sargasso and Philippine seas to mate, but to this day no one has witnessed eels spawning, and no one knows how they travel so far without food. In human terms, it's like having just one chance at sex before you die, but you have to swim from the moon to earth - without stopping to eat - to get it. No wonder the Japanese consider eels an aphrodisiac.

[from The Zen of Fish ]

Growing true

Ctitrus does not grow true from the seed:

In Florida, most orange trees have lemon roots. In California, nearly all lemon trees are grown on orange roots. This sort of thing is not unique with citrus. With the stone fruits, there is a certain latitude. Plums can be grown on cherry trees and apricots on peach trees, but a one-on-one relationship like that is only the beginning with citrus. A single citrus tree can be turned into a carnival, with lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, kumquats, and oranges all ripening on its branches at the same time. Trees that are almost completely valueless for their fruit seem to make the most valuable rootstocks.

[From Oranges by John McPhee.]

"You have gestures"

Christine Kenneally on a study by Tomasello that aimed to determine differences between how humans and other primates use gestures and language:

The answer, he believes, is that humans are particularly cooperative in the way they communicate....In many theories of evolution, human altruism is treated as an anomaly. But Tomasello thinks of it as an evolutionary strategy that has served us incredibly well.
...
Tomasello and his colleagues' gesture work demonstrates both a continuum that connects human and ape communication and signficant differences between them. In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bred more offspring with those characteristics, Tomasello said. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared. Chimpanzees took a different path. In their communication, there is never just plain showing, where the goal is simply to share attention. While they do share and collaborate and understand different kinds of intentions, they dont have communicative intentions.
...
Tomasello's conclusions resonate deeply with observations made by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh...[who] worked with two apes called Sherman and Austin. The apes successfully acquired many signs and used them effectively. There didn't seem to be anything odd about their language use until one day they were asked to talk to each other. What resulted was a sign-shouting match; neither ape was willing to listen. Language, worte Savage-Rumbaugh, 'coordinates behaviors between individuals by a complex process of exchanging behaviors that are punctuated by speech.'

At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work. Symbols like words, said Tomasello, are devices that coordinate attention, just as pointing does. They presuppose a general give-and-take that chimpanzees don't seem to have. For this reason, Tomasello explained, "asking why only humans use language is like asking why only humans build skyscrapers, when the fact is that only humans, among primates, build freestanding shelters at all...At our current level of understanding, asking why apes do not have language may not be our most productive question. A much more productive question, and one that can currently lead us to much more interesting lines of empirical research, is asking why apes do not even point."

[from The First Word - The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally - the passage above is probably my favorite fascinating tidbit in a book that's full of fascinating tidbits.]