Führerstodestag

64 years ago, a 56 yearold, hiding in his bunker with his enemies surrounding him, committed suicide by cyanide capsule and gunshot to the right temple. That's right, today is dead Hitler day. Never heard of dead Hitler day? What about Führerstodestag? No? Well, more's the shame. It's, naturally, the anniversary of that perticular toad's death. It went a little like this

By late April 1945, his little empire in the sand had got kicked down pretty thoroughly. The Russians were occupying parts of Berlin, where his bunker was located. On the 22nd, he apparently had a nervous breakdown as he realized it was over - that the Russians were battling their way to the centre of town, and he knew they would get him, take him, and they probably wouldn't kill him right away. on the 28th, he leant that one of his senior commanders was negotiating with the Allied forces to surrender, and that former allay Mussolini had been executed. On midnight of April 29th, he married his mistriss in an abrupt cerimony, dictated his will at 4am, took a nap, and at 3:30pm, shot himself in the temple, while his himstress only used the cyinide.

I like spelling out the details, because of how ignoble it was. It really gets the skinheads angry, especially if you lay it on thick. I reccomend the following, myself:

You know how big of a coward he was? He had to test the cyanie on his dog, because he was too scared.

Which is true - he killed his dog, and her offspring, basically in a fit of paranoia. After he died, his staff almost immediately all light up their cigarettes - Hitler was anti-smoking. He was that well liked.

Traditional Dead-Hitler days activites include picking fights with racist jerks, gloating over holocaust deniers, enjoying the feeling that bad people sometimes get what's coming to them on earth, and having a big hunk of meat for dinner - Hitler was a very ardent vegetarian, too. He reportedly liked going into graphic detail about slaugtering animals, when he had meat eating guests over. Strangely, slaughtering humans had no such ill-effects on his stomach...

So, happy vegetarian Führerstodestag, folks. Unless you're a skinhead, in which case I hope it's miserable.

Pictures

Your standards may vary.

Danger! Human stuff! Remember my disclaimer! Don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy!

It shouldn't come as a controversial that our behaviour is different in winter. We sleep more, we're less energetic, we've got slightly larger appetites, etc. Previous studies had shown that humans also experience shifts in hormone levels. Do seasonal fluctuations in men's hormone correspond to changes in mate choice?

Two Polish researchers, a place with something that passes for a proper winter, decided to put this question to the test. They showed over a hundred men of varying backgrounds computer-generated pictures of females of varying attractiveness, and had the respondents record scores for various attributes (e.g., `facial attractiveness,` `body shape,` etc.). They repeated this in the summer with the same pictures, and took the same measurements.

They found that in the winter, males tended to rate females as being more attractive than they did the same attributes in the summer. This held true for all attributes except for facial attractiveness, which remained constant between seasons.

The authors, being perception researchers, ascribed a different mechanism to this - They suggest that seasonally, your exposure to body types vary. In the summer, males are exposed to more female bodies than in the winter. Though I'm not sure I agree with their hypothesis, I've an anecdote to illustrate this. I was waiting at ADFG for the winter antlerless permits, like the idiot I was. There were a great number of people in line during that -40 snap we had, and you got to talking to stave off boredom (and to take your mind off the cold we were standing in for hours and hours). I spend quite the while talking to someone named Red (the third Red I've met, not counting people called Kavirliq).

Well, fastforward a bit to when it's only -20°C, and a partner and I were going down a mountain when one of our Snowmachines got stuck. We're trying to get it unstuck, when Red and a few others come down the trail behind us. They graciously help us dig it out of the mess we got stuck on... but I couldn't help but notice that Red wasn't a male, like I'd assumed before. She wasn't wearing all her heavy winter gear, and so you could quite distinctly notice she was a her, albeit a tall "her" with a lower voice, but otherwise unquestionably female. You just couldn't tell before, because all the clothes.

Now this is an extreme example. Most of the time, you interact with people indoors, and they're not wearing carharts, a parka, a face mask, a trapper's hat, musher's mitts and bunnyboots. But humans do tend to wear long sleeves and pants, along with looser fitting garments and bulkier clothes in the winter. This is to contrast with Summer, when it's shorts and T-shirts all around. The authors argue chronic exposure to one setting or the other is what leads to acclimatization, and therefore varying the threshold of `what is attractive.` My own thinking runs more toward seasonal fluctuations of hormone titres, but I've minimal evidence to support this.

Citation:

Perception. 2008;37(7):1079-85.

Men's attraction to women's bodies changes seasonally.
Pawlowski B, Sorokowski P.

Caugak ukuk?

Well, some of you told me you all liked this, so here's an easier one. It's got a skull, if you want to go based on that, but also, it's got a reeeeeally recognizable skin:
You might have seen these on hats, parkas, and a billion other places, because they've got good skins. Be a little more exact that `rodent!` Also, I'm curious what other names exist for these critters.

If you're paying attention, you'd have noticed the title isn't `Cauga una?` That's because there's two of them, so you have to change the question to reflect this. Cauga goes to caugak, and Una for this goes to ukuk for `these two`.

Bad year coming up?

I wonder, how bad are they going to cut into the subsistence quota on the Yukon? The answer that they're going to cut really deep into it. Commercial fishing is going to eliminated all together, probably for the whole season. Fish are food. Literally. Yugcetun, the words for food and fish is the same, and for generic eating also comes from the word for fish. And of all the fish, Salmon are the very, very most important by a huge degree. By orders of magnitude. I know they got to meet escapement goals - continuation of the species is important. But if you think things are tough on the lower Yukon before, you go through and do that to the subsistence quota, and shut down commercial fishing, and you see how things go.

Spring Civil Engineering

I might have invited disaster on us all, because I finally got around to packing away all my winter gear. If the temperature suddenly plunges to -40°, I will gladly hand myself over to the angry mob.

After yesterday morning, though, it definitely felt like spring was in full force. Snow was melting so fast that while I was poking around for gear that I might have lost in the snow (like my axe, which I forgot to paint orange...), I heard what sounded like a large stream. I went on over to investigate, and it was a stream, going into the pond. There hadn't been a little river there before!

Also, it's the time of civil engineering projects around the home. I needed to grain the small ocean building around my house, before it got deep enough to flood me, so I dug a few slit trenches to drain everything off. (Edit to add: pretty much all the runoff from the hills flows directly to me. And I'm in a wetlands to begin with. Thus the water.) Everything's frozen this morning, but it looks like before it froze, I got it to a mere half a foot at its deepest. The trench also filled in with gravel and silt, so if we have much more melt off, I'll need to go re-dig it. Someplaces don't need shovels, but they need backloaders...

It's also to that time of year you're required to take your studs off, and that's exactly why this post isn't longer or more interesting. I've got an early appointment at the shop to swap my winter tires for my summer. I know most people put this off until after the deadline to switch, but I don't want to risk the fine...

Swine Flu in NYC?

I was watching the hockey game on TV (Pens/Flyers) when NBC popped on to say that swine flu had been found in NYC. Well, that's something to be concerned about. I'm not overly concerned yet, but the speed with which this is picking up does give me a few seconds for pause.

I'm no epidemiology expert, but I can point you all to a very good Iowan Epidemiologist who keeps a very neat blog over at http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/ She's been a little idle of late, but she popped up to make a post about what you need to know about swine flu.

Briefly

I'm feeling markedly unwell today (heart burn), and exhausted to boot, so I'm going to be brief.

Usually, I have ads turned off, thanks to a plugin. But today, I had the plugin turned off to watch a few hockey highlights (Go wings!), so I saw this on the DNM website today:
Is it just me, or does that look real old timey? So old that you have to spell it olde. When I saw it, I thought of this places' adverts (They are satire, by the way).

The skull from last week was a Ringed Seal (Pusa hispida), or Nayiq. I love that one, because someone - someone who is not me - wrote nayiq right on the label. I just imagine all the students seeing that and wondering what that's supposed to mean.

I'd throw up a new museum specimen for you all, but it seems interest in that is waning (or was never really there).

Surreal

A video in which a Nobel prize winning physicist has to explain plate tectonics to a sitting US Congress member. Are these really the best and brightest we can come up with?

WIth the power of my MIND

I got sent this link in the mail, apparently from a friend who read it on a news site. It's a toy that reacts to how hard you mentally concentrate.

Wow. I mean, WOW. That is so cool. Sure, it doesn't do anything, but that doesn't make it any less awesome!

At the end of the article they talk about a drinking game they made up on the spot, and it reminded me about a fictional drinking game that Douglas Adams made up. Douglas Adams, a humourist, invented a drinking game where you use telekinesis to tip over a bottle of alcohol into someone's glass. And he remarked `once you start losing, you tend to keep losing.`

Technology is awesome.

Pictures from around the home

The little critters are out in force. The geese are returning, the sun is out, and everything's turning to mud and slush. And these little guys are poking their heads up
I love how unwary spruce grouse are. Sadly, season for them ended March 31st.
These guys are out in number, too. They start to look dirty this time of year - like they've been lightly dusted with grey. You could reach out and grab them, there's so many around. But by now, they're becoming wormy, and not really good to eat.


Here's the pond behind (technically in front) of my home. I haven't seen any geese yet, but it's a little too early for them to want to try places like my little old pond. I'll have to go to "my lakes," which are away from my home a bit. The weather is too good. I feel like we're being set up for something nasty.

Oh, yeah, it's earth day...

Oh! It's earth day. I didn't really remember until I read someone's post on things they're doing to `green` up (and I don't mean what comes after breakup!), and maybe get her girl a scout badge at the same time... ;)

You'd think a guy like me would be big into enviro-whatevers. I like sustainability, I'm interested in wind power, and I work for critter conservation. A lot of my co-wokers are all gungho about all this stuff, and they're somewhat aghast when I say I've never read Aldo Leopold. But just because I'm not nutty about it doesn't mean I don't care...

When we think about pollution, we think about New Jersy. Definitely not Alaska. The first indication I got that even remote areas aren't as protected as we like to think was when I was studying the Northern Shoveler in Utah. They're goofy looking ducks, with unmistakable bills. There's frequently concerns about mercury in waterfowl in Utah, due to the Great Salt Lake being about as polluted as my boots are muddy. I took feather clippings and studied them for mercury content. Unsurprisingly, I found quite a bit - more than I'd ever want to eat. Ready to scold the Utahns for sullying perfectly fine birds, a minor fact wafted to my forebrain: the feathers grew in while the birds were up in the Arctic.

The environment isn't just a few people in the lower 48's concern. Folks in China are doing things to poison our birds here. Global warming - sorry crazy guys in DNM's comment section - is real, and it's from folks in California and New York who are pushing it along. For as much as we complain about the lower 48 coming up here and telling folks what to do, it's about time we start doing the reverse.

So here's my modest earthday proposal: We should invade the lower 48, and get involved in the discussion about how they're going to live their lives. Because what they chose greatly influences our own choices.

Pictures

Here comes the sun little darling

It's got to that point of the year, where you need to get out the tinfoil...
... Unless you want to wake up at 5:30 each morning!

Tinfoil. It's Alaskan home decor.

Steer Deer on Kodiak Island

I was all ready to write about some silly post about a story in the BBC claiming that the moon effects the flavour of wine (short version - it only effects the people who believe the moon has power), when someone passed me this story titled `malformations seen in Kodiak deer.` Hey!, I thought to my self. This looks familiar. Perhaps it's that stuff from CSU.

I should have been ready for horrible disappointment. The story is awful. The story is from AP, where they had a single writer stumble through the science, and proceed to mutilate it. Because it's from AP, and it's Alaska related, both the DNM and the ADN instantly picked it up, without even a whit of review. I don't know what's worse, the people who wrote the story, or the people who passed this on. There's a little hope for journalism, though, because the Kodiak Daily Mirror did a better job with the story. Unsurprisingly, they wrote their own version.

Here's my own version.

A little background is in order. First, Sitka Black Tailed Deer (SBTD) are small ungulates endemic to the Alexander Archipelago, mainland SE Alaska, and parts of British Columbia. In 1924, 14 animals were translocated from Baranof island to Long Island east of Kodiak Island. 2 more came from POW in 1930, and 9 more came Kupreanof Island, and were released to north of Kodiak Island. For those of you who need to whip out the calculator, that's 25 animals total. All SBTD in the Kodiak Archipelago come from these founders.

Fastforward to the early-mid 90s, when reports began to emerge about deer with abnormal antlers - antlers with extreme points on the end, frequently with poor symmetry. The body profile of these animals also seemed altered, and most interestingly (to a wildlife biologist!), they seemed to suffer from cryptorchidism, or the failure of one or both testes to develop or descend. The scientists called them `cryptorchid deer.` Locals call them `Steer Deer.` I like the latter.

To compound the issue, there appears to be a locational trend in the Steer deer. A survey of the area found that there was even higher rates of incidence on the Aliulik Peninsula animals (76%) when compared to the rest of the Archipelago (12%). When you look at the rest of the SBTD's range <<5% are steer deer. Clearly, there's something going on here.

Well, if you remembered my post on muskox, you're probably thinking `gosh, 25 animals? That's a small group!` And I would give you a cookie for remembering. 25 Animals is a really small group. It's even smaller when you consider the estimates for heterozygosity - a measure of diversity - are tiny numbers. The Tasmanian Devil, which is critically endangered, actually has the SBTD beat. Now that's just sad.

Well, some people from Colorado State University decided to take a swing at idea that the deer are really inbred, suffer from low diversity, and this is causing their problems. They came up here, did sampling across the Kodiak Archipelago, some in the Alexander, and managed to leave quite a few furious Alaskan scientists in their wake. I hadn't dealt with them directly, but rumour around the coffee pot is that they earned the animosity of a few people.

After their data collection, they looked for a few things -

• Was there population structure between island?
• Was there population structure between Kodiak proper, and the Aliulik peninsula?
• Was there different levels of inbreeding between areas?

These were easy questions to answer, "Yes, No, No." The first, is almost expected, because the deer don't disperse over water, or don't frequently. So they're isolated from eachother. There were no DNA differences between SBTD on the Kodiak Archipelago between areas harder effected and areas less effected. Finally, inbreeding doesn't seem likely an effect, because measures that get at inbreeding and diversity seemed pretty comparable between SE and Kodiak, and within Kodiak.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us without any new answers, just a list of things that aren't causing it. There are still a few remaining hypotheses that need tested, but are much harder to tackle -

• It could be environmental toxicity.
• It could be a disease.
• It could be an epigenetic trait.

There's currently almost no evidence for any of these. Not because they aren't necessarily true - one of them probably is - but because evidence is really, really hard to get. However, people have jumped all over environmental toxicity with vengeance. This seems the hypothesis du jour today (I say, hoping I used du jour right). The AP service story basically said the evidence points to this, when the evidence does no such thing.

Useless

I'm very disappointed in our elected state officials right now. The legislative session is over, without any progress on the big issue that affects everyone in our state: energy. Energy is choking our industry. Energy is killing bush Alaska. Energy is causing emigration from even our `large cities.` Many people in the legislature were elected on platforms of energy reform. It's stuff we all care about.

They had one job. Just one. And that was to do something about energy. And they managed to screw that up.

What the heck are we paying them for?

Via Slashdot:

"Not much more to add. The BBC is reporting that 'Stephen Hawking is "very ill" in hospital.' He has had a few health scares before, and as a post-graduate he was told he didn't have much longer to live; he's now 67."

Hawking, who everyone knows as that really smart guy in the wheel chair who can't speak, suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is frankly a horrible condition. His prognosis from that alone is `not good.`

Well, that's put a damper on my day.