There's a fascinating article in the July 2006 issue of Scientific American, but alas, it's not available online without a subscription. Entitled "What Birds See", it describes the ability of birds to see and respond to colors beyond what we mere humans can see, into the near ultraviolet.
Humans have three different types of cones in our eyes. We detect color when our brains receive signals from two or more of these types of cones, and our brains compare the signals to form the sensation of color. Color itself is not actually a property of light or of objects that reflect light; it only exists once the brain has processed the data from the cones. That's why, incidentally, that we can use three colored lights in televisions to simulate all the colors; red and green lights, when mixed in the proper proportions, stimulate the cones in the same way that a yellow light would.
Mammals used to have four types of cones, way, way back, millions of years ago, but in those days, mammals were mainly nocturnal critters, so they had more need for the rods that enable vision in dim light. At some point mammals lost two types of cones; happily for us, the primate lineage regained one at some point.
But birds still have four different varieties of cones, so they can perceive many more colors than we can. Think of the color range that humans can sense as being represented by a triangle; to obtain all the additional colors that birds can see, we would have to expand that triangle into three dimensions to make a three-sided pyramid. That's a lot of colors!
Reminds me of the very early story by Isaac Asimov called The Secret Sense where (I'm writing this from memory, as I haven't read the story in over thirty years) a human is temporarily given a sense available only to an alien race; when he loses the sense, he feels like he has been blinded.
Remember that the next time you see a bird; they can perceive far more about this world than you can.
His figure whirling round my brain
A creature science can't explain
It's not a bird, it's not a plane,
It's Superman.
So went a song in the 1966 musical It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Superman! (music and lyrics by Strouse and Adams). Recently the National Geographic Channel has been running a program called The Science of Superman, which attempts to explore the science behind Superman's superpowers.
It's conclusion? Basically science can't explain most of Superman's powers.
One nice thing about the show is that it recognizes that Superman is a comic book character. Too often, the comic book aspects of the Man of Steel are minimized in these television documentaries, whose main purpose is to promote the latest Superman movie.
For me Superman was, is, and always will be a great comic book character (I'm thinking of late 50's, early 60's). I've never been satisfied with any of the movie or tv show incarnations and never much cared for any of the actors who played him. George Reeves was the best, but perhaps that was because he was the first I came to know. By the time Christopher Reeve came along, well, he was younger than I was, so obviously he wasn't a good choice. Can't have a Superman who's still green around the gills.
I sort of liked the mid-90's updating called Lois and Clark (though I liked to call it Lewis and Clark), but mainly because it kept the Kents alive and I enjoyed the actors who played Jonathan and Martha.
Every time I think I'm starting to enjoy the current Smallville series, the writers toss in a wildly preposterous plot twist that makes me want to throw something.
The worst perversion of Superman, at least the worst that I can recall, occurs in the first season of the 50's series. A couple of baddies (a married couple, I believe) discover Superman's secret identity; Superman's response is to take them to a remote area, where they die trying to escape. To my way of thinking, that was a real perversion of Superman's character, as he wasn't upholding some noble principle or saving someone's life; he was just selfishly protecting his stupid identity.
His secret identity only works if it isn't taken too seriously; it should only be played for laughs. After all, a pair of glasses does not make for a very effective mask.
I've finally figured out where I want to get a job!!!!
Did you know that every employee of Ben and Jerry's in Vermont gets to take home three (count 'em, Three) pints of ice cream each and every day?!!!!!
I've been listening to one of my favorite podcasts, the Scientific American Podcast, where this week Steve Mirsky interviewed two employees of Ben and Jerry's to find out more about the science of ice cream (yeah, right).
Last evening Keith Olbermann did a very funny piece on Ann Coulter and how much of her latest book is plagiarized from other sources. As I say, it was funny, but it was also beside the point. From what I can gather, her plagiarism consists of individual sentences here and there. It doesn't rise to the level of, say, that noted plagiarist Ben Steyn.
If the media have to waste time on Coulter, I wish they'd spend their resources doing substantive critiques of all her many lies and distortions. To get them started, let me direct their attention to PZ Myers' takedown of a Coulter fan.
Just watched 2010 for the first time. It's sort of like a 2001 For Dummies.
Where 2001 was poetic, this was prosaic, even pedestrian. Where 2001 was practically a silent film with little dialog and vast stretches of realistic outer space scenes, this was way too noisy. It seems to have inherited all the worst and stupidest aspects of the Star Trek series. What is it about film makers? Are they stupid? Or do they just think their audience is stupid? Are they right?
Anyway, that's not to say I didn't like it; just that I was disappointed in many areas and felt it should have been much better than it was.
A good question to ponder on Independence Day:
Has This Country Gone Completely Insane?
I celebrated this Independence Day by watching the movie 1776.
Others have celebrated by reading the Declaration of Independence.
Sometimes it's good to remember some of the less pleasant aspects of the Declaration, such as this passage:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
And this, which was deleted from the Declaration in order to get all the delegates to approve it:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivatng and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people for whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.
Last evening I watched the first part of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the first time in probably well over twenty years, and I was amazed at how well it still holds up. I've always had problems with it, but I've also always enjoyed the sheer craft that went into making it.
One scene rang a seriously jarring note, however. Dr. Heywood Floyd has to pass through a voice-recognition system to identify himself; the instructions are duly recited and he is told to speak his name, his last name followed by his "Christian" name. "Christian" name? What the f...?
Why would a noted atheist like Arthur C. Clarke let a howler like that get into the screenplay? Surely, he would see this futuristic international space station as taking a more neutral stance on religious matters. And then it struck me. What if this was his subtle way of suggesting that in the future world of 2001, certain Christian sects had been able to establish a religious dictatorship? Hmmm.
Anyway, the conclusion of the first part, just before the intermission, is perhaps one of the most chilling moments in screen history, as it becomes clear that Hal the computer intends to harm the humans under his control. That Kubrick makes this clear not with words but with economical camera angles and deft editing, makes it all the more unnerving.
This scene is also the subject of one of my favorite Isaac Asimov anecdotes. Dr. Asimov, who in a series of stories about robots, had developed the Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which was that a robot could not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm. When Asimov attended a preview screening of 2001 back in 1968, he was so incensed by the idea of an intelligent computer (just another form of robot) intentionally doing harm to a human, that at the intermission he
went seething up the aisle toward a friend of mine I noticed in the audience.
In tones of deep shock, I said to him, "They're breaking First Law! They're breaking First Law!"
And my friend answered, calmly, "So why don't you strike them with lightning, Isaac!"