Category Archives: Pedantry

Basically Everything is Worms






Ducks and Horses



The Fight


Horse-Sized Duck





Duck-Sized Horses













Extra Credit Biology Questions

  1. Which king died from eating too many lampreys?
  2. Which Roman emperor saved a slave from being thrown to the lampreys?
  3. What’s the green stuff in the yolk of hard-boiled eggs, and how do you stop it appearing?
  4. Where can one see Arnold Schwartzeneggar’s handprints (not just footprints) on public display?
  5. What problem does the Scarecrow face when he gets his brain?
  6. There’s a science fiction story I read once where a mad scientist operated on crocodiles to repair the imperfect septum in their heart and make it four-chambered. The crocs became frisky, agile, and started putting on weight. What happened to them ultimately?
  7. What’s the major scientific flaw in this story?
  8. How many Philistines did Samson slay with the jawbone of an ass?
  9. Why an ass?
  10. When did people stop calling the stuff in your head ‘your brains’ and start calling it ‘your brain’, and why?
  11. Do people really eat live monkey brains?
  12. Which bit of the cow’s stomach tastes nicest?
  13. How can you tell that skeleton on the banner belonged to a bird, and was it a bird that could kick you to death?

What, if Anything, is Big Bird?








Wincing Whirligigs, Batman!

jacket_the_canon.jpg The Canon
Natalie Angier
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
ISBN: 0618242953
A whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science. The subtitle says it all. Natalie Angier provides a one-chapter crash course on each of the natural sciences, and the scientific method and probability to boot. Worthy stuff, and I’ve been looking for a single volume like this; something I can give to my friends and family, not too demanding, but enough science to excite them and help them see things a little bit from my nerdy point of view. It’s not a long book (although the designer cheats with very tight linespacing), and Angier is a New York Times reporter with a Pulitzer. So why did it irritate me so much that I reached the end only through sheer bloody-mindedness, audibly wincing every few pages?

Like I said, the subtitle says it all. We know what a whirlwind tour is, but what the heck is a whirligig tour? Poetically, one that’s hectic and constantly changing; literally, it’s a pinwheel, a brightly-coloured child’s toy that’s amusing and pointless. An unfortunate metaphor, and the first of many. Angier loves slapdash metaphors. Also flowery turns of phrase, obscure and only somewhat-appropriate words, zany non-sequiturs, and alliteration (e.g., the beautiful basics in the subtitle). Here’s a typical paragraph.

Scientific notation works just as well for the furtive as for the discursive, although in this case you’re talking about powers of one-tenth rather than powers of ten. One-tenth of one-tenth is one-hundredth, written as 10-2; one-tenth of one-hundredth is one-thousandth, or 10-3. Keep biting the right-handed bit of Alice’s toadstool. Down you go, you’re a fractionated Italianate family. You’re milli — a thousandth, 10-3; or micro — a millionth, 10-6; or nano — a billionth, 10-9; or pico — a trillionth, 10-12; or femto — a millionth of a billionth, 10-15.

Some people might like this sort of wordplay, but it gives me hives–and it’s not even good wordplay. Furtive for small is nice, but since when did discursive mean big? Meandering and full of digressions, like Angier’s metaphors, yes, perhaps expansive, but only incidentally large. And what’s up with Italianate? Does she mean Latinate (although the prefixes are actually Greek)? Or do Nano and Pico sound like comical Italian names? (Pico Iyer’s the only Pico I know of, and his name’s Indian.) Lastly, the Lewis Carroll reference is just a bit too sloppy: it’s a mushroom, not a toadstool (an important distinction, if you’re eating it). And it makes you grow taller and shorter, not bigger and smaller–in the original, Alice elongates and contracts like a caterpillar.

Every page is like this. Angier plunders the dictionary for shiny words: proptosically, vinculum, slub, and surl. As she flails for synonyms, the soup of particles in stellar formation becomes a cosmic chowder or a plasmic bisque, until the star and the metaphor collapse in a ball of baklava, whatever that’s supposed to look like. Every page has its pun, mostly lame. Pop culture allusions abound but are random and baffling rather than illuminating. And lists of three or more things always, without exception, conclude with something wacky.

…one might find organisms that take in nutrients, excrete waste, replicate, and actually use the fondue set they got as a wedding present.…

As for Pluto and Sedna and others of their subcompact class, whether you consider them planets, dwarf planets, planetismals, planet parodies, or Planters party mix…

Dave Barry it’s not. Which is a shame, because if you can get past the florid language she does a pretty good job of explaining one or two core concepts from each of chemistry, physics, astronomy and so on. There are some factual blunders, as you’d expect in a book covering all of science–I only picked up the biological ones. She says the platypus comes from New Zealand, and the carpal is just a single bone. Those hackneyed tetrapod forelimbs get trotted out again (she’s got me doing it now), and they’re poetically called homonyms–words that sound the same but have different meanings–but her metaphor is almost exactly backwards: bat and cat forelimbs are superficially different but share a deep, homologous, structure. Most importantly, she constantly confuses the fact of evolution (using examples from the fossil record) and Darwin’s theory; the fossils she cites support descent with modification but not natural selection.

It’s a shame. Angier is an great science journalist, but The Canon‘s enthusiasm has a whiff of anxiety, as if she was so worried about getting through to the science-averse that her entire rhetorical bag of tricks was upended on the table. If you’re happy to sort though the pile for the good stuff, you’ll enjoy this book more than I did. But I’d still rather recommend Bill Bryson.

Motherhood Handwaving

In the New York Times Magazine on March 4, Sharon Lerner argued that “making it easier for women to work may be the best way to increase birthrates.” Certainly most European countries think so; all have some form of paid maternity leave, and many are trying to increase it. Lerner goes on to note a paradox, though:

“Curiously, Europe’s lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea than the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece have among the lowest fertility rates in Western Europe. Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like Finland, Norway and Denmark, have among the highest birthrates.”

That is curious, isn’t it? Stereotypically, Catholics breed like rabbits, while the ultra-modern Scandinavians are the ones who forget to have children. I was so intrigued that I decided to check. I pulled the relevant data from Wikipedia (specifically, birthrates, paid maternity leave, and prevalence of Catholicism) and ran some quick stats.

euromaternity.gif Surprisingly, there’s no statistically-significant relationship between the amount of maternity leave a country offers and its birthrate. The highest birthrates on the graph, by the way, are in Ireland, Iceland, and Cyprus. The lowest is Germany’s. As you can see, Spain and Greece are not especially low; in fact, they’re about average for Europe, as is Sweden, which offers by far the most generous parental leave. And contrary to Lerner’s claim, Portugal actually has a higher birthrate than Finland.

These statistics aren’t occult knowledge. It took me two minutes with Google and Wikipedia to find the numbers, and not much longer to type them into Excel and make some graphs. Don’t magazines employ fact checkers anymore?

eurocatholicism.gif I couldn’t think of an simple stat that measures a country’s sexism (sorry, I mean “traditional attitude towards women”), but the amount of Catholicism in a given population is a matter of record. There’s another surprising result if you plot popery against birthrate. It looks like both Lerner and the stereotype are wrong–Catholics are having neither more nor fewer babies than anyone else. (If anyone can think of how to test the sexism hypothesis, let me know. Better still, do the analysis yourself, post the graph, and send me the link.)

Why this disparity between the article’s claims and the data? I’m not a demographic theorist, and I’m completely ignorant of the extensive literature on birthrates. But if one wanted to claim that maternity leave raises fertility, the first problem to overcome, surely, is that the numbers don’t back you up. One possible response would be lots of handwaving to convince readers that it only seems like you’re wrong; in this case, mysterious hidden factors just happen to precisely counteract the positive effects of maternity leave.

It doesn’t help, though, that the quote above contains some basic factual errors, as well as a couple of weasel phrases (“among the lowest…in Western Europe”). Neither inspire confidence. Of course, they also raise the suspicion that the researchers’ conclusions have been decided in advance, and the numbers are being cherry-picked (which is the other way to deal with unhelpful data). Which strategy is being employed here? I don’t know. But it’s wonderful that we can fact-check on a Sunday morning from the comfort of our living rooms.

The World’s Population in a Big Box

How big a box would you need for everybody?

Well, how much space do people take up? Assuming an average human mass of 65 kg, and a density of close to 1 (since we only just float), a person occupies 65,000 cubic centimeters. In theory you could pack about 15 people in a cubic meter (or 1,000,000 cubic centimeters). That seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Let’s check. It turns out the record for stuffing smallish undergraduates into a telephone booth is 22, and a phone booth is about 1.3 cubic meters inside. And remember, the folks near the bottom of the Big Box will be somewhat…compressed. Nevertheless, let’s assume an average of 13 people per cubic meter, since those near the top won’t be so packed so tightly.

The current world population is 6.6 billion. At 13 people per cubic meter, that’s a 507,692,308 m3 box; if it’s a cube, the Big Box is 798 m on each interior side. Say we make it an even 800 m (which allows for another 56 million people, probably as many as will be born by the time we’ve wrangled everyone inside). Don’t ask me how thick the walls would need to be; I’m not an engineer.

Exactly how big is a box 800 m a side? That’s half a mile. The World Trade Center was 417 m high. The box would take up 32 city blocks in Manhattan; it’d fit neatly into a fifth of Central Park.

The world’s population thus occupies an eighth of a cubic mile. All together we’d weigh 430 metric megatons. The pressure on the poor folks at the bottom would be half a ton per square inch, or 64 atmospheres–in fact, what you’d feel nearly half a mile deep in the ocean. The sea of humanity indeed.

Obviously you’d want to be one of the last inside the Big Box. How many people would be left standing when it was filled? The area of the top of the box is 640,000 m2, and a common estimate for crowd density is 6 people to the square meter. That means nearly 4 million people get to stand on top of everybody else; coincidentally, about the population of New Zealand. Lucky Kiwis!


Spotting Fake Critters

aanimals.jpg Astonishing Animals
Tim Flannery; illustrated by Peter Schouten
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004
ISBN: 0871138751










