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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
December 6, 2025 at 9:34am December 6, 2025 at 9:34am
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Science: investigating the really important stuff since 1666.
The Number One reason to go Number Two?
You've downed a cup of strong coffee, and soon you have an urge to poop.
You may be wondering how those of us who don't drink coffee can manage to pinch a loaf every now and then. I mean, sometimes I'm backed up for days or weeks, watching my friends who do drink coffee answer the call of doody and return with a satisfied smile on their faces. I'm jealous.
...Of course I'm joking. Everybody poops.
After you've done your business, you feel a sense of relief. So why does that bowel movement feel so satisfying?
You know, science isn't really about answering "why" questions. They tend to multiply themselves. Better to ask "how."
There are many physical, behavioral and psychological factors that could contribute to this feeling.
I'd think there would be a sound evolutionary reason for it: if it hurts, you don't do it as much, and if you don't do it, you get sick and die, and if you get sick and die early enough, your genes don't get passed on.
As the bowels fill up, nerve endings communicate an uncomfortable stretching sensation to the brain.
Except, presumably, in people who have somehow wrecked 'em.
Typically, thanks to the external sphincter, we don't immediately poop.
Young-person-like typing detected.
Emptying out the bowels by releasing stool relieves this pressure, which feels good.
Can't recommend the smell, though.
"When you relieve the distension, areas like the anterior cingulate gyrus and the insula show a reward response," she said. These regions of the brain play a role in reacting to pain and relief of pain.
Okay. That's still not "why."
The gut communicates to the brain via the vagus nerve, one of the major cranial nerves. Evacuating the bowels stimulates the vagus nerve. This can lower a person's blood pressure and heart rate, creating a relaxing feeling, Person said.
This feels like a circular argument. Stimulating the vagus nerve makes you feel good. Dropping the kids off at the pool stimulates the vagus nerve. Therefore, laying cable feels good.
Don't get me wrong; it's good to investigate the mechanisms behind bodily functions. It might help doctors figure out how to fix you. But it's still a "how" thing, not a "why" thing.
Or maybe I'm just full of shit. |
December 5, 2025 at 10:04am December 5, 2025 at 10:04am
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Wading back in to what we writers work with, here's a listicle about words from Mental Floss:
You know, sometimes, the perfect word doesn't exist, so we have to create it. It worked for Shakespeare. It worked for Charles Dodgson. Fantasy and science fiction are especially prone to the creation of new words, because they deal with new (to us) worlds. Though, admittedly, sometimes they go overboard with it.
Anyway, the article.
Language is ever-evolving, with new words springing up from a variety of places. Some are borrowed from other languages (“karaoke”), others are two words blended together (“doomscrolling”), and some are simply shortened (“decaf”).
And sometimes, we just make them up because we feel like it.
As I've said numerous times, all words are made-up. It's only a matter of how long ago.
Science fiction is a particularly bountiful genre for the introduction of new words, in large part because authors come up with unique and otherworldly terms to describe their sci-fi worlds.
Like, where would we be without "frack" from the original Battlestar:Galactica?
As usual, I'm only going to comment on a few of them here.
Robot and Robotics
The word “robot” can be traced back to Czech writer Karel Čapek and his sci-fi play R.U.R. (1920).
I did a whole entry on that last month: "No Ifs, Androids, or Bots" 
Grok
Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) follows Valentine Michael Smith, a human born and raised on Mars, as he experiences Earth for the first time.
No word is sufficient enough to express my white-hot anger at having this word appropriated for nefarious purposes. Stranger was a life-changing novel for me, and I've read all of Heinlein's published works. Yes, even the weird, self-indulgent, freaky ones. (I'm not saying I loved all of them.) If there's one writer I can credit for instilling in me a lifelong love of science fiction, and reading and writing in general, it's Heinlein. Well, also Niven. But mostly Heinlein.
So Muskmelon comes along and, first, ruins the good name of Nikola Tesla. That was bad enough. Then he goes and appropriates grok?
My anger burns with the fiery power of a million supernovas.
Metaverse
In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash introduced the word metaverse to the world. Set in a dystopian future, characters use VR headsets to connect to a universally used virtual world called the “metaverse.”
I don't have nearly the same level of seething rage over this appropriation.
For me, the most memorable thing about Snow Crash was the name of the main character: Hiro Protagonist. You'll never come up with a better name. Neither will I. It is, in practice, absolutely impossible to invent a better name for a novel's main character. Simply can't be done, like accelerating past lightspeed, counting to infinity, or finding an honest politician.
Newspeak
George Orwell’s dystopian sci-fi novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) introduced many new words and phrases to the world.
And make no mistake, 1984 was absolutely science fiction. Most lit-snobs refuse to acknowledge this (or many of Vonnegut's works, as well) because they've been programmed to believe that science fiction is all escapist pulp brainrot and can't possibly be Serious Literature Being All Serious.
There are, as I said, more at the link. I like SF and I like word origins, so how could I resist? |
December 4, 2025 at 10:31am December 4, 2025 at 10:31am
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Been a while since I had an astronomy thing to share. This one's from Smithsonian.
I could quibble about their use of "history" there (it's more of a history of humans' lore and science about the cluster than the history of the stars themselves), or the almost-clickbaity "amazing." But that's all I'm going to say about those things.
The Nebra sky disc, as their find is now known, is circular, about 12 inches across and decorated with intriguing gold symbols. Some we can recognize instantly, and others are more ambiguous. But they all appear to be celestial: A crescent shape represents either the moon or an eclipsed sun, and a bright circle depicts the sun or the full moon.
The article includes a sketch of the disc in question, and I can see why the sun and moon might be ambiguous. I also found a photo of the thing from Wikipedia.
Thirty-two stars cover the disc, but seven particularly draw the eye. They stand out, because they form a tight cluster. Given the cost of materials and craft needed to create this rare object, this must have been a deliberate attempt to portray a cluster of seven stars in the night sky. As such, it can represent only one astronomical formation.
The cluster doesn't really look much like the actual Pleiades, but then again, neither does the current Subaru logo.
(As the article notes, "Subaru" is what the Pleiades are called in Japanese. And there's no truth to the rumor that I drive a Subaru because I'm a huge fan of astronomy. That's only, like, 75% of the reason. They're solid vehicles.)
Nowhere else can a tight group of about seven stars be found easily with the naked eye. And this visibility is why we can find references to the Pleiades from almost all civilizations that left records, under many different names.
I met someone once with an interest in astronomy but very little actual knowledge. I'm not ragging on him, mind you; we all start out with very little actual knowledge, and he was eager to learn more, which is always to be encouraged. So, he knew the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and maybe Orion. But then he pointed off to Orion's right and asked, "So is that the Micro Dipper?"
I mean, why not, right? Look at the thing.
Why is it said to have “about seven stars”? While the cluster is easy to spot, the precise number of stars we see will depend on the conditions: A veil of high clouds, light pollution and light from the moon can all have an impact. So can the time of night and our eyesight.
I never was able to count them, even back when I had near-perfect vision, so I just went with the "seven" thing.
In 1961, the late astronomer Patrick Moore put this question to the audience of the popular BBC weekly television program he hosted, “The Sky at Night,” and viewers wrote in with their answers. The numbers varied: Some saw fewer than 7, others saw 8 stars, 9 or even, in one case, 11. But the average number was seven.
I have to wonder how much of that was priming, like I experienced. You're told seven, so you see seven. I don't know.
But the number seven will persist. It’s a sticky number, popular in ancient times and considered lucky by many to this day.
Oh, no, it's not just popular or lucky. Come on. Seven is indelibly associated with astrology, the precursor to astronomy. Early sky-watchers noticed that, against what for all practical pre-industrial Earthbound purposes is a fixed background of stars, a number of bodies persisted (unlike, say, comets) but moved around. And that number was seven: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn; all visible to the naked eye. Or whatever different cultures called those wanderers. The concept of a seven-day week was built around that, though the English version is mostly named in the Germanic, not Roman, style (Saturday is an exception).
When Newton, who was a mystic as well as a scientist, studied the spectrum of sunlight, he identified seven colors, our familiar ROYGBIV rainbow. As the spectrum is, well, a spectrum, a continuum, the mostly-arbitrary number seven was undoubtedly influenced by this ancient astrological tradition. (Can you tell indigo from violet on a rainbow? I certainly can't.)
Point is, yes, it's a sticky number, but it's a sticky number for sound historical (if not scientific) reasons.
In autumn, the Pleiades can be seen climbing above the eastern horizon soon after dusk. In spring, they catch up with the sun, and we soon lose them again.
Those sentences are, obviously, written from a Northern Hemisphere perspective. As the article notes, native Australians and other upside-downers also had a thing for what we call the Pleiades.
The Pleiades rise and set close to northeast and northwest from temperate latitudes. Like all stars that rise over the eastern horizon, they climb until they reach their highest point when they are due south—a moment known to astronomers as “culmination”—before descending toward the western horizon.
Given astronomers' penchant for solitude and isolation, I'm surprised they don't call it "climax."
There is a belief in some circles that the Druids marked Samhain, the precursor of Halloween, using the culmination of the Pleiades at midnight, which is plausible.
Meh. Plausible, I'll grant. But we know little more than jack and shit about the actual Druids, and there's already too much speculation and reinterpretation going on about them.
The Pleiades are not a constellation in themselves, but they’re part of a much larger pattern: the constellation of Taurus, the bull.
Here's where I really break with the article, but not in a "makes the whole article bogus" way. What we call constellations are based, primarily, on the lore of ancient Europe, with maybe some Mesopotamia thrown in. Their boundaries are arbitrary, and the Northern Hemisphere ones in particular borrow from that mythology. Other cultures put different interpretations on the shapes they saw in the stars, with different lore and different arrangements.
In other words, we can say "star A is in constellation X," but that's just a categorization thing, helpful in communicating to the general public and other astronomers, but having no real basis in science. It's kind of like saying "Paris is in France," but, apart from the coastline, the borders of France are a matter of custom, law, wars, culture, and human decision-making, not any fixed and objective measure. (Even when they follow natural boundaries like mountain ridges.) Those boundaries have changed with time, and, before a certain point in time, France didn't exist at all. Neither did Paris. Nor the Pleiades.
Still, yes, we don't consider the Pleiades a constellation in itself. Neither are either of the Dippers. That kind of recognizable shape that's not an official constellation is called an asterism. In an alternate universe where the sky is the same but human culture unfolded differently, our names and boundaries for the constellations would be different.
There's another bit of lore about the Pleiades that I especially like: the story of Bear Lodge, which the North American colonizers called Devil's Tower. "Bear Lodge" is a rough translation of the Lakota name of that prominent landmark. And the Lakota story about it is intimately tied with what we call the Pleiades.
There's more here, and in the references on that page, and elsewhere on the internet, but I'll paste the most relevant section of the Wiki page:
According to the traditional beliefs of Native American peoples, the Kiowa and Lakota, a group of girls went out to play and were spotted by several giant bears, who began to chase them. In an effort to escape the bears, the girls climbed atop a rock, fell to their knees, and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. Hearing their prayers, the Great Spirit made the rock rise from the ground towards the heavens so that the bears could not reach the girls. The bears, in an effort to climb the rock, left deep claw marks in the sides, which had become too steep to climb. Those are the marks which appear today on the sides of Devils Tower. When the girls reached the sky, they were turned into the stars of the Pleiades.
That story bears (I'd apologize for that pun, but I don't do that) all of the hallmarks of classic mythology: an origin story, interpreted through the lens of the culture that spawned the myth. And I don't mean "myth" in the sense of "falsehood" here; I mean those powerful cultural stories that both arise from and shape the worldviews of the cultures that spawn them.
I couldn't tell you why that particular story resonates with me. As far as I know, I have no Native American ancestry. I guess I just love a good myth, while at the same time acknowledging that Bear Lodge was as much a natural formation as the Pleiades themselves.
The difference being that the Pleiades asterism belongs to everyone.
And no one. |
December 3, 2025 at 8:26am December 3, 2025 at 8:26am
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Now this... this is what science is for. A short but piquant article from PhysOrg:
This is one of those times when it pays to go to the article to see the picture. Because when I saw it, I thought they'd made the artificial tongue look like an actual, disembodied, floppy tongue.
The appearance of a hot sauce or pepper doesn't reveal whether it's mild or likely to scorch someone's taste buds, but researchers have now created an artificial tongue to quickly detect spiciness.
Or you just dare an insecure teenage boy to eat it, preferably when he's around people he's trying to impress.
Inspired by milk's casein proteins, which bind to capsaicin and relieve the burn of spicy foods, the researchers incorporated milk powder into a gel sensor.
Okay, so it's not a step on the way to unlimited free energy or anything, but it's at least useful.
"Our flexible artificial tongue holds tremendous potential in spicy sensation estimation for portable taste-monitoring devices, movable humanoid robots, or patients with sensory impairments like ageusia, for example," says Weijun Deng, the study's lead author.
Except, of course, for the bit about "movable humanoid robots." Don't give them a sense of taste. Have you not read science fiction? They will develop a taste for human flesh.
Still, the article goes into a bit more background, but, as I said, it's short.
As a proof-of-concept, the researchers tested eight pepper types and eight spicy foods (including several hot sauces) on the artificial tongue and measured how spicy they were by changes in electrical current. A panel of taste testers rated the spiciness of the same items.
I have to wonder if they had a diverse group on the panel; that is, some from spicy-food cultures and others from the American Midwest. Because while spice level is objective, reaction to it is subjective.
Now, I'm a fan of spicy food. I don't eat it to show off; I genuinely enjoy the heat... up to a point, but that point is far beyond that of my fellow Americans of Midwestern origin. But this would be useful to anyone, whether they're trying to find, or to avoid, the hotter stuff.
I'm just disappointed that it's not, ultimately, shaped like an actual, pink, floppy, disembodied, human tongue. |
December 2, 2025 at 9:31am December 2, 2025 at 9:31am
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Well, this isn't going to be my usual sort of thing. It's personal and might even border on offensive. A lived experience related by CBC:
What's this got to do with anything? Well, I'm about the same age. Of course, she's female and Canadian, so we couldn't possibly be more different. Still. The writer is only a few months older than I am, still the leading edge of Gen-X, if you have to believe in marketing age categories.
I’ve just passed another milestone birthday, and yet the familiar dread of reluctantly skidding into a new decade seems to have softened somewhat.
I'm almost there, and I don't feel dread. Just a profound resignation.
The quiet realization that my yesterdays outnumber my tomorrows feels less like a threat and more like a gift.
Oh, lucky you. I've had that realization for twenty years now.
Aging, I’ve come to see, is a privilege.
I suppose that's a nice, healthy way to look at it. Naturally, I don't agree.
My dear friend Natalie died after a brief illness almost a year ago at the age of 57.
That sucks. Truly. I'm not trying to diminish anyone's grief here, or play who-had-it-worse. All I want to do is try to understand someone else's perspective, and share my own, which is neither better nor worse, just different.
See, my own experiences with loss lead me to a different conclusion.
First, I spent 20 years watching one parent, then the other, decline into profound dementia, then die frightened and bewildered. Losing one's parents is, I know, the natural order of things. But the dementia thing is spit in the face.
The second thing isn't a direct experience, but something I found out about later. It was about a girl I dated in high school, but later fell out of touch with—not too serious, not too casual, but somewhere in the middle. I asked a mutual friend about her, years later, after a chance encounter on the internet. Not to stalk or anything, but just out of curiosity about an old friend. Turned out that this woman had gotten married, went on her honeymoon, came back and was walking around excited about her new life when she dropped dead on the street. One moment alive; next moment, corpse.
So, reading the article in the link up there reminded me that, if I had the choice between a slow decline into brainless senility, or just getting switched off like a lightbulb, I know which one I'd pick.
Of course, we don't get to pick. No, I'm not suicidal. I'm just not afraid of being dead. Maybe I am, at least a little, of dying.
But I cannot and will not consider aging to be a privilege.
It's just something that happens to most of us, like it or not, until it stops. |
December 1, 2025 at 9:43am December 1, 2025 at 9:43am
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If you like the *shudder* outdoors, here's a secret from SFGate:
Except I guess it isn't a secret anymore, is it? Now that you've told the entire world with a webpage. Way to go, assholes. Way to ruin it.
The article does, of course, include pictures, and they're cool. Though some of them are suggestive enough that you might not want to view them at work or around kids.
The slot canyon’s sandstone layers were so flawless they looked as though they’d been thrown on a pottery wheel.
Careful, there. Wouldn't want to give the creationists any ammunition.
This sculpted maze could easily have been mistaken for Arizona’s wildly popular Upper or Lower Antelope Canyon.
You'll have to forgive me for never having heard of the Antelopes. I live on the other side of the country, and I'm an indoorsman.
Pretty sure I've seen pictures of them, but without attribution.
While smaller in size, this secluded fissure is just as extraordinary, with the same curving walls and an ever-changing orbit of gold and purple shades, occasionally transformed by light rays into vibrant reds and oranges, adorning its narrow passageways — but far fewer crowds.
This is the sort of description that makes travel writing work, incidentally.
And like its more famous counterpart, it’s only accessible through a Navajo tour.
Well, then, maybe it'll just have to be on them to keep the crowds manageable.
Reaching the canyon entrance is an adventure in itself: It requires a 20-minute off-road ride in one of the company’s modified, open-air (bring layers!) Ford F-350s.
Oh, did Ford pay you for the product placement?
For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with Arizona, the "layers" thing is because, though you might have heard how scorchingly hot Phoenix can get, that state can also get finger-numbingly cold.
Upon arrival, McCabe began walking our group of 12 through millions of years of geological history. “It’s volume and velocity that forms a slot canyon,” he said, referring to the many flash floods that carved the formation through repeated erosion of its soft rock, which was then further shaped by wind.
SCIENCE!
McCabe pointed out sandstone formations that resembled an elephant, some woolly mammoths and even an Egyptian queen as we went.
Somehow, I don't think any of those are Navajo things.
Well, maybe the Egyptian queen. As Steve Martin related in his musical documentary, speaking of Tutankhamen, "Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia."
McCabe explained that to the Navajo people, slot canyons are symbols of creation — linking the physical and spiritual worlds — and are often associated with guardian spirits.
So we come to the main reason I saved this article at all: the combination of science and spirituality. Apparently, not everyone sees a need to choose between the two.
While I haven't done canyon hikes (I haven't even been to the Grand one), I have spent time in Navajo country, and I can attest that it's pretty damn awesome. I try to swing through every time I go out west, sometimes staying in Page or Kayenta.
Maybe next time, if there is a next time, I'll go look at some rocks. |
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