I Did Not Finish it with sufficiently extreme prejudice that I sent it back to the library and myself to the back of a multiple-months-long hold queue if I decide I do want to subject myself to more of it.
( Read more... )
... and leads with an explanation of "opponency" that I did not quite manage to follow, for reasons that have more to do with typesetting of the ebook than anything else, but which problem I addressed by Visiting Wikipedia.
The wikipedia page on opponent process begins
The opponent process is a color theory...
... and indeed when my eyebrows raised and my eyes flicked over to the table of contents, I was unsurprised to see a section titled "Criticism".
All of which led inexorably on to impossible colors and, delightfully, the line of purples.
Yong has not thus far (I am a little under halfway through the chapter) even gestured vaguely in the direction of the immediately-obvious-to-me-from-the-opening-sentence-on-wikipedia Controversy about opponency, which means that I (i) have no idea and (ii) am poorly equipped to judge how this particular Controversy compares with The Controversy About Mantle Plumes wherein the small number of people who think thermal convective upwellings Aren't What's Going On for a long time were also the only people who cared about the wikipedia page on mantle plumes, which has at some point in the last decade been extensively edited to reflect actual current scientific consensus. Which in turn means that I am unsure how large a grain of salt to take with everything else Yong says!
Meanwhile,
Our [human] lenses typically block out UV, but people who have lost their lenses to surgeries or accidents can perceive UV as whitish blue. This happened to the painter Claude Monet, who lost his left lens at the age of 82. He began seeing the UV light that reflects off water lilies, and started painting them as whitish blue instead of white.
There are thousands of different animal opsins, but they are all related.* Their unity creates a paradox. If all vision relies on the same proteins, and if those proteins all detect light, then why are eyes so diverse? The answer lies in light’s distinct properties. Since most light on Earth comes from the sun, its presence can hint at temperature, time of day, or depth of water. It reflects off objects, revealing enemies, mates, and shelter. It travels in straight lines and is blocked by solid obstacles, creating telltale features like shadows and silhouettes. It covers Earth-scale distances almost instantaneously, offering a fast and far-ranging source of information. Vision is diverse because light is informative in a multitude of ways, and animals sense it for myriad reasons.
* In 2012, evolutionary biologist Megan Porter compared almost 900 opsins from different species, and confirmed that they share a single ancestor. That original opsin arose in one of the earliest animals and was so efficient at capturing light that evolution never conjured up a better alternative. Instead, the ancestral protein diversified into a wide family tree of opsins, which now underlie all vision. Porter draws that tree as a circle, with branches radiating outward from a single point. It looks like a giant eye.
Okay, I have only got a very little further with this book, but Footnote Number Three to Chapter One made me make a noise with my face.
In a discussion about olfaction, and specifically quantifying how good various species are at it:
I've deliberately avoided putting hard numbers on the scale of these differences. It is easy to find estimates, and very hard to find primary sources for them;; after an hours-long search that included a scientific paper that sourced a factoid to a book in the For Dummies series, I fell into an existential void and questioned the very nature of knowledge. Regardless, the differences are there, and they're substantial; it's only a question of exactly how substantial they are.
Part of the reason it is slow going is that there are A Fair Few Footnotes; they're Good (see above); and because this is a library loan I am reading via Libby on my phone, which handles footnotes in a way I'd be (or at least think I was) fine with if my ereader weren't so much better at it.
The other part is that I keep getting distracted by following up references. e.g. a fifteen-minute trawl prompted by Footnote Number 12:
... Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist who studies olfaction, has come closer than anyone else to wrangling this complexity [of trying to predict how any given molecule will smell, and how mixtures will smell, and so on and so forth]. While I was writing this book, he and his team developed a measure that analyzes 21 features of odorant molecules and collapses these into a single number. The closer this smell metric is for any two molecules, the more similar their odors. This isn't quite the same as predicting scent from structure, but it's the next best thin--predicting scent from similarity to other scents.
This parameterisation (?) of scent is a 2020 Nature article. Earlier work, published in PNAS 2012 and covered in an informal article by Nature discusses "olfactory white", toward which mixtures of odorants tend -- think white noise or white light.
Alas this trawl also turned up a New Scientist article in which the guy is claimed to have asserted that scent has an important role to play in Women Synchronising Their Menstrual Cycles (which, uh, by 2015 -- when the NS article was published -- had... had its existence as a phenomenon called into question), but I'm inclined (having thus far done nothing more involved than skimming the first sentences of abstracts) to suspect him of common or garden misogyny, of a form that's unlikely to significantly bias the results his group reports over and above the extent to which, you know, Existing In A Society does.
So I'm heading back to Ed Yong! With some new-to-me perfume nerd thoughts sloshing gently around my head.
In the run-up to my viva I decided that the nicest way to make my totally spurious personal-use-only hard copy of my thesis would be using a £90 hole punch, so I stacked up some discount codes and bought into the Atoma disc-binding system. Obviously, when you have a £90 hole punch you bought for a single specific purpose, you fairly rapidly discover that you are in possession of a solution looking for problems.
Happily, Admin: the LRP presents no shortage of problems.
... or, more helpfully: after the first event of 2022, we decided that we could do a little bit better in terms of issue-tracking than my horrible scribbled bits of torn paper, and designed and set up a whole entire analogue ticket system based on query slips!
( Background. So much background. )
For convenience, I have taken to collating like query slips we'll probably want to refer back to during the event (the background above; lost property; found property; ...) into disc-bound booklets. Alas, "white paper someone's scribbled all over" doesn't really stand out much from The Chaos; happily, this gives me an excuse to make FLUORESCENT NOTEBOOK COVERS with the contents written on the front in BIG FRIENDLY LETTERS.
Because reasons, I had a stack of fluorescent cardstock -- pink and orange and yellow and green. The thing is, though, that Admin: the LRP has A Colour Scheme. That colour scheme is Royal Blue. Obviously, therefore, I wanted some obnoxiously loud fluorescent blue cardboard.
... I was a frankly embarrassing way into tediously unedifying search results before it occurred to me to double-check how fluorescence actually works.
To first approximation, things are colours because they absorb all the visible wavelengths of light except the one they appear to be, which they reflect back to you more-or-less unaltered. Per wikipedia:
Fluorescence is the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. It is a form of luminescence. In most cases, the emitted light has a longer wavelength, and therefore a lower photon energy, than the absorbed radiation ... Strongly fluorescent pigments often have an unusual appearance which is often described colloquially as a "neon color" (originally "day-glo" in the late 1960s, early 1970s). This phenomenon was termed "Farbenglut" by Hermann von Helmholtz and "fluorence" by Ralph M. Evans. It is generally thought to be related to the high brightness of the color relative to what it would be as a component of white. Fluorescence shifts energy in the incident illumination from shorter wavelengths to longer (such as blue to yellow) and thus can make the fluorescent color appear brighter (more saturated) than it could possibly be by reflection alone.
... oh, I realise, belatedly. Oh. Er. Fluorescent blue is not really a thing in most contexts... because blue light is the shortest wavelength in the visible spectrum... so since fluorescence works by converting shorter-wavelength light to longer-wavelength light... fluorescent blue only really works if you've got lots of UV bouncing around the place... whiiich isn't something that happens very much in domestic indoor settings so it er isn't surprising that (i) there isn't much demand for it, and (ii) fluorescent green is the shortest-wavelength colour that's trivially available on cardstock.
And so! I have resigned myself to making do with the colours I already have available (I've been doing some clearing out of Stuff from my parents', and a giant stash of 90s kids' stationery has mostly gone on Freecycle, but a few bits of it I kept), and as consolation have a bit more of an understanding of How Colours and How Lights, and on the whole I think this is a fair trade.
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lireavue first flagged up to me and ewt subsequently reminded me of at an opportune moment. I am mildly annoyed that I missed the first day's session on The Latest New Treatments for Migraine -- the way this works is that the cut-down 30-minute interviews are available for free for 24 hours and then paywalled, and I hadn't quite got my head around when the 24 hour period in question was going to end -- but I think I'm picking up lots of the detail from other conversations. I am learning a lot, and currently mostly digesting. More to follow, perhaps, but I think my favourite thing so far has been Messoud Ashina, talking about setting up a ten-step approach to diagnosis and management of migraine, saying: Well, there was some years ago -- in fact inspired by some of my junior scientists -- I was told that, uh, why don't we do ten steps for migraine? Because they found, ah, literature on other diseases, and they said, well, this is something we're missing, and you know, if you want to be, erm, let's say, contemporary, you have to listen to what your junior scientists are telling you. And they say that this is something missing, and you have to look at it. At first I said well, I'm too busy, about that, but they say no, you have to read some literature. Then I read the literature and, ah, must admit that I was impressed by their persistence, and I say, well, let's do it.
ilyena_sylph for the link. <3sciatrix very kindly held my hand through doing some Actual Statistics (Sorta), and the first-pass result is Promising though I need to do some more detailed breakdowns simont the other day, and he went "wait they scream?" and I was forced to add the disclaimer above... and then I poked the internet and found, uh, Vocalization in caterpillars: a novel-sound-producing mechanism for insects: Insects have evolved a great diversity of sound-producing mechanisms largely attributable to their hardened exoskeleton, which can be rubbed, vibrated or tapped against different substrates to produce acoustic signals. However, sound production by forced air, while common in vertebrates, is poorly understood in insects. We report on a caterpillar that ‘vocalizes’ by forcing air into and out of its gut.
sebastienne yesterday. Do batteries weigh more when they're fully charged?redbird, who provided the version I finally mustered the executive function to click on), and includes an onward link to the publication itself (open access), which I have been finding just charming. Five of the 13 authors have their affiliation listed (in the PDF) as "Citizen Scientist, Finland", which is exactly right and proper and as it should be and has been giving me warm fuzzies all day.On 7 October 2018, the auroral watchers spotted the dunes again, this time marking the start of a detective story uncovering the physics the dunes represent. We organized an ad hoc campaign in the evening of 7 October 2018, where the scientists and the citizen observers from different parts of Finland were in real‐time connection. As a result, we gained several consecutive and simultaneous pictures with calibrated camera clocks throughout Finland. These pictures, presented in this paper, formed the backbone of this study.
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