With many of the explainers (and the two leaders of the pack) ailing with flu-like symptoms, colds, sniffles, shakes, stuffiness, and sultry voice, I thought I would post a few links all about chicken soup including some of my favorite recipes.
Matzo Ball Soup from Smitten Kitchen
Get Well Soon Soup from Chef John
The Science of Chicken Soup from NY Times
And the Study that the Article Quotes (with another scientific recipe)
Feel Better!!
Well it’s been about a month since the first post about the garden in my backyard. Things are going super awesome and its so fun to see how much growth can happen in just one month. A few weeks ago we saw white flowers on the pea plants. They seemed a little closed up but last saturday we noticed that there were about 5 pods scattered around the plants. They are super fast and seem to be really productive. Both the squash and tomatoes have been growing pretty well and have the beginnings of buds forming. Here are some pictures…
Sylvia warned me about the possibilities of lead poisoning, but a lot of the research that I did say that the chances of the lead reaching the fruits is negligible. We’ve been trying the technique of affixing aluminum foil to plastic boards and letting the sun hit both sides of the plants. The only plants that haven’t experienced dramatic growth are the two peppers. But I still have faith.
In related news the Members Class on soil happened yesterday and everything went really well. We dumped dirt all over the floor of TI, learned about worm pee, and planted lima beans and succulents. All in all – fun times.
What emotions do these photos conjure up? Does one connote a noble symbol of freedom and the other a urban nuisance? Where do these ideas come from?
Here’s a neat article that I read today in the NY Times science Tuesday by one of my favorite science writers, Natalie Angier, about the problems with “biobigotry” (hope that one doesn’t come up on a crossword puzzle). The phenomenon has to do with how certain animals are assigned emotional associations by humans good and bad.
Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
It reminded me of how all the sections of the museum are intrinsically connected, with the biology and mind section able to intersect when considering the ways that human brains unconsciously view animals. I can imagine a version of the male/female – work/home game with animals and bad/good categories.
The other day, out of the blue, Carolyn said to me: “I know who Kristin reminds me of! The blond female Gelfling from The Dark Crystal!”. I was skeptical until I google-imaged (I sort of can’t believe I just used that as a verb…) Kira the Gelfling. You be the judge:
Kira the Gelfling on the left.
Kristin the Explainer.
I’m thinking, slap an orange jacket on Kira, and she’d be indistinguishable from Kristin. Yes? No? Anyone? Bueller?
I just checked out a book in the library called The Best American Science Writing 2006. Now I can be totally caught up with all the developments that happened in science two years ago. Woo-hoo! But funny enough in the first article called “Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore” Natalie Angier writes about the exhibit we looked at in training this morning.
“In one study, scientists started with the familiar Stroop test, in which subjects are flashed a series of words written in different colors and are asked to react by calling out the colors of the words rather than the words themselves.
The researchers then inserted a number of obscenities and vulgarities in the standard lineup. Charting participants’ immediate and delayed responses, the researchers found that, first of all, people needed significantly more time to trill out the colors of the curse words than they did for neutral terms like chair.”
What does everyone think of an explainer box with colored markers and paper so we can try this on the floor. Just kidding! But it is interesting to see some of the other things that you can do with this type of exhibit that may initially seem less open ended.
There are also tests that can be done about how many of the words that the participant can remember after the test. In this specific example people remembered the swear words and there colors but had trouble with the words next to them.
So Amisha sent out the link about the squid that have infiltrated the bay. Here’s the link.
The unintentional comedy factor for this video is pretty high even though it’s produced by QUEST a PBS station in San Francisco. In the beginning they totally try to make it seem like their talking about aliens or something. It’s also funny when they talk about haw in the thirties people thought it was jolly good sport to go giant squid hunting. Field trip anyone?
So I’ve been doing some outside research on the cow’s eye demonstration and it turns out that some of the information that we give is just not correct. Apparently a few other museums and schools do the dissection but have passed on many false ideas. An article that I stumbled across debunked some of the mis-information and I think that we should take these corrections into account in our dissections. I wanted to post a few of the insights that I found and the scientific article that back up the claims…
The tapetum actually is also found in a human eye but the effect of the translucence is very very faint.
The vitreous humor remains very very hard while the cow is alive and only becomes jelly-like after the cells start to decompose.
The stuff that we call melanin in the dissection is actually ‘black blood’ dyed by an unrelated chemical in the eye.
The cow does not see in black and white, but actually in shades of green to better notice the grass in the fields.
The cow’s eye and the human eye are actually approximately the same size, but there’s just more of our eye under the skin.
There are some other startling revelations in the article below. It just goes to show how much information can be passed along by word of mouth without anyone actually checking up on the facts.
