Outrageously Incorrect . . . Now

1953: Husband furious because you've missed the post? The Pitney-Bowes Postage Meter prints the stamp and seals the envelope all in one go.

Yes, the ad at right caught our attention, too. Hummm . . . maybe the 1950s weren't the golden age of innocence as those years are so often portrayed.

The Daily Mail's Femail blog brought these ads to our attention in an incredible posting titled The outrageously politically incorrect adverts from the time equality forgot. Take a look--you'll either enjoy or be appalled by the trip down memory lane. We were both.

(Thanks to Thom Pigaga for pointing us to this post!)

New Art Form: The Medical Rap

The Bryant Park Project pointed us to the fabulously amusing UAB Emergency Room Rap, a video created by ER nurses in celebration of National Nurses' Week:


But wait, there's more!

You should also watch the wonderful Diagnosis Wenckebach video created by the University of Alberta 2010 Med class. (Wenckebach is a type of cardiac arrhythmia.)

Icks of the Trade*

Meville describes our opinion of November with the opening lines of Moby Dick, where Ishmael says,

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. (our emphasis)

Apparently, we're not the only ones to feel this way in November, especially regarding our jobs.

The Atlantic's Barbara Wallraff runs a regular feature titled Word Fugitives, in which she asks readers to contribute names for the situations of modern life. Back in July/August, she requested coinages for *"'unpleasant occurances that come with a job'--that is, a word for the opposite of a perquisite." In the December issue, she gives top honors to icks of the trade, but readers submitted other notable coinages, too:

. . . the most popular suggestion was cringe benefit. Arno McTavin, of Longmont, Colo., proposed fringe badefit; Ann Rock of Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., the rather erudite not-a-bene; and a few readers the Judeo-Christian trials of job.

Bruce Evans, of Mesa, Ariz., sugested dreckuisite; Apryl Lamb of Durham, N.C., suquisite; and more than one reader irquisite. Gail Wells, of Corvallis, Ore., wrote, "I'd call them stuckquisites, as in 'Guess I'm stuckquisite again.'" David Noller, of Burbank, Calif., wrote, "This is known as a gozewit--as in, 'Hey buddy, dat goze wit' da territory!'"

You can read the entire Word Fugitives article in the December issue of The Atlantic.

Norman Mailer Dead at 84

Norman Mailer -- author of more than 30 works and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize -- is dead at 84. He died Saturday, November 10, 2007, of renal failure.

In an interview with The Times upon the release of his last book, Mailer said,

. . . "In two years I will have been a published novelist for 60 years. That’s not true for very many of us." And he recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.

"I think the novel is on the way out," he said. "I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that."

The New York Times obituary: Norman Mailer, Towering Writer with Matching Ego, Is Dead

Slideshow of Norman Mailer images, from The New York Times

A collection of remembrances of Norman Mailer by Marlon Brando, Liz Smith, Irving Howe, Diana Trilling, Edward Abbey, Germaine Greer, and other notables, compiled by Dana Cook at Salon.com: Norman Mailer 1923 - 2007

Free Rice

The twin goals of the web game Free Rice are

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
   

Here's how it works: for every word you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated by the web site's advertisers. The rice is distributed via the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The computer program tracks your vocabulary level and adjusts the difficulty of the words it asks you; the highest level is 50, although and we at nHumanities only managed to get to 47 50! (We tried again.)

When the web site started on October 7, it generated only 830 grains of rice, but yesterday--November 10--it generated 122,377,240 grains. A look at the web site's total page is the perfect illustration of what we mean by a viral website.

Thanks to Nancy Fees for pointing us to this web site!

Ummmm . . . Umami!

Listen to Krulwich's fabulous report at NPR.

Thousands of years ago, humans decided that we could distinguish four tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. (At right, an illustration of human taste buds from Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body.)

As Robert Krulwich engagingly reports in a recent edition of Krulwich on Science, a fifth taste was discovered in the late 19th c. at about the same time by Chef Auguste Escoffier in Paris and chemist Kikunae Ikeda in Japan. This rich, wonderful, yummy taste is the taste of deep veal stock and a good bowl of dashi--it's the taste of glutamic acid, but Ikeda named it umami, which means delicious or yummy in Japanese.

But don't take our word for it, please listen to Krulwich's original report (7:47 min.), which will take you there via the magic of radio.

Fruit Flies and Free Will

Free will. It's one of those nagging issues that's been around for a long time and which most of us do our best to ignore, although we English types tend to fret about it whenever we teach Oedipus Rex.

Google the term Free Will and you will generate a great many links to philosophical ruminations on the topic. (You'll also get a lot of hits for free software which will enable you to produce your own last will and testament, but that's another issue entirely.) Virtually every philosopher worth his or her salt has wrestled with the problem.

It was inevitable that scientists would weigh in on such a ripe topic. Last May neurobiologists at the Free University of Berlin in Germany published an article in Plos one entitled "Order in Spontaneous Behavior", which took a look at the issue not from the perspective of a Greek king and his mother but from the perspective of the fruit fly.

The researchers glued fruit flies to torque meters and put them in a white environment and then recorded where they tried to go. The result? Well, according to "Order in Spontaneous Behavior"

Instead of random noise, we find a fractal order (resembling Lévy flights) in the temporal structure of spontaneous flight maneuvers in tethered Drosophila fruit flies. Lévy-like probabilistic behavior patterns are evolutionarily conserved, suggesting a general neural mechanism underlying spontaneous behavior.

This set off a spate of somewhat more readable articles on the original research. It also led Scott Adams in The Dilbert Blog to observe that a more accurate title of the paper would be “Study Shows Fruit Flies Look Around Even When There’s Not Much to Look At.”

Links:

• Free Will -- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Free Will -- The Catholic Encyclopedia
  
• Study hints that fruit flies have free will-- MSNBC
• Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will?-- (complete with photos and diagrams)
• Free Will in Fruit Flies -- The Dilbert Blog
• Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices -- Reuters