You Shall Not Pass!

Love this video!  Poor dogs.  Cats suck.   :(

You Shall Not Pass, Dog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7znI_Kpzbs

By the way...
People see videos like this and think that a cat could actually take a dog in a fight.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Yes, some dogs are afraid of cats.  Yes, some dogs don't want to get scratched.  But in a fight, take the dog.  I have known a number of dogs who are NOT intimidated by cats.  In fact, I saw one of my childhood dogs kill a cat rather easily.

Another time, I saw another of my childhood dogs, one of my dad's dogs, attempt to eat a cat--until I stepped in and stopped him.  In that case the dog went in after a cat who was hiding under a bench against a wall.  The cat must have scratched him because he pulled back out.  Then he said this: "Wait a minute, I don't care if I get scratched. Actually, I don't care if the cat gouges my eye out.  I am eating that cat."  He dove in under the bench and went after the cat.  The cat scrambled up the wall behind the bench onto a window sill.  At which time the dog (Numnuts was his name, by the way) simply reached over, grabbed the midsection cat in his mouth, leaned his head back to get the cat back into his jaws, and was about to cut the cat in half.  Fortunately I pushed Numnuts' skin into his jaw to prevent him from biting down, thus freeing the cat.

The story does have a happy ending.  The cat was very friendly, not aloof like some cats are, and even killed a mouse in his brief week-long stay at my dad's house (someone had abandoned her there, on my dad's porch).  Numnuts kept trying to eat the cat all week; he was very confused as to why he was not allowed to eat her.  I brought the cat to my mother's house, where she lived the rest of her 15+ years.

Google Who

Another great interactive Google Doodle today!
http://www.google.com/doodles/doctor-whos-50th-anniversary?doodle=10152301

This doodle celebrates 50 years of Doctor Who.  You DO watch it, don't you?  I'm happy to say that my daughters also like it too!

The doodle links you to a neat game.  See how fast you go.  I got a time of 6:51 in my second attempt (only played twice).

Our superpower: The ability to sweat.

Saw this TED talk recently, on a long flight.  Really caught my ear.  Not because I'm a runner, but much of what he was saying seems to apply to my long distance skating.

"Christopher McDougall: Are we born to run?"
http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_to_run.html

The interesting thing I learned is that while humans don't have super strength or sharp claws, we do have something that other animals don't, not to the same degree anyway: the ability to sweat.  "Because the one advantage we have in the wilderness--again, it's not our fangs and our claws and our speed--the only thing we do really, really well is sweat.  We're really good at being sweaty and smelly.  Better than any other mammal on Earth, we can sweat really well!  But the advantage of that little bit of social discomfort is the fact that, when it comes to running under hot heat for long distance, we're superb, we're teh best on the planet."


Another interesting tidbit from the TED talk: We peak athletically around the age of 27.  But for certain endurance sports, such as running, we can maintain our performance quite well as we age.  McDougall says that we can maintain our 19-year-old performance level until we are 64 years old!  "64-year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19."

Bottom line: I'll keep skating for a long time!  :)


I did a little bit of clicking around the Internet and found this article on our ability to sweat, how this may have been a biological adaptation we, as a species, made many years ago.

"Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners"
Article by Alvin Powell, reporting on a talk by Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/04/humans-hot-sweaty-natural-born-runners/

"While more than a million humans run marathons voluntarily each year, most animals we consider excellent runners — antelopes and cheetahs, for example — are built for speed, not endurance. Even nature’s best animal distance runners — such as horses and dogs — will run similar distances only if forced to do so, and the startling evidence is that humans are better at it, Lieberman said."

"'Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom,' Lieberman said."

"Though those adaptations make humans and our immediate ancestors better runners, it is our ability to run in the heat that Lieberman said may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game."

"Humans, he said, have several adaptations that help us dump the enormous amounts of heat generated by running. These adaptations include our hairlessness, our ability to sweat, and the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, which not only allows us to take bigger breaths, but also helps dump heat."

"'We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in,' Lieberman said."


Remember that the next time you go to the zoo.  Other animals have some fabulous gifts, but we humans are also physically impressive!

"I will be happy when... "

Some great advice in this article.  From the Huffington Post:

"How to Get Flat Abs, Have Amazing Sex and Rule the World in 8 Easy Steps"

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3956114

Be happy now.
Let people in.

Song of the Day: Tim McGraw - Highway Don't Care

Continuing my country music kick, from two days ago.  This is the second of two songs that jumped out at me from the recent Country Music Awards list of best song nominees.

Tim McGraw (and friends) - "Highway Don't Care"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmxaY_OVvWA

For some reason I want to just point my VFR north and ride.  Or east.  Maybe west.  Who cares, really?  (Not the highway!)  Not a short ride, let it run for hundreds of miles.  Okay, maybe I'll wait for summer...    :)

Song of the Day: A Capella Science - Bohemian Gravity

Okay, you have to love the creativity of this next song.  I sure did!  Listen and try to learn something!

"A Capella Science - Bohemian Gravity!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjbtsX7twc


A Capella Science - Bohemian Gravity!
---------------
Is string theory right?
Is it just fantasy?
Caught in the landscape,
Out of touch with reality
Compactified
On S5 or T*S3

Space is a pure void
Why should it be stringy?
Because it's quantum not classical
Nonrenormalizable
Any way you quantize
You'll encounter infinity
You see

Quanta
Must interact
Via paths we understand
Using Feynman diagrams
Often, they will just rebound
But now and then they go another way
A quantum
Loooooop
Infinities will make you cry
Unless you can renormalize your model
Of baryons, fermions
And all other states of matter

Curved space:
The graviton
Can be thought of as a field
But these infinities are real
In a many-body
Loop diagram
Our results diverge no matter what we do...
A Quantum Soup (any way you quantize)
Kiss your fields goodbye
Guess Einstein's theory wasn't complete at all!

I see extended 1-D objects with no mass
What's their use? What's their use? Can they give us quark plasma?
What to minimize?
What functional describes this
String?
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
How to quantize I don't know
Polyakov!
I'm just a worldsheet, please minimize me
He's just a worldsheet from a string theory
Reperametrized by a Weyl symmetry!

Fermi, Bose, open, closed, orientable?
Vibrations
Modes! They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Become particles (particles!)
Become particles (many many many many particle...)
Modes modes modes modes modes modes modes!
Oh mamma mia mamma mia,
Such a sea of particles!
A tachyon, with a dilaton and gravity-vity-VITY

(rock out!)

Now we need ten dimensions and I'll tell you why
(anomaly cancellation!)
So to get down to 4D we compactify!
Oh, Kahler!
(Kahler manifold)
Manifolds must be Kahler!
(Complex Reimannian symplectic form)
If we wanna preserve
Any of our super-symmetry

(Superstrings of type I, IIa and IIb)
(Heterotic O and Heterotic E)
(All are one through S and T duality)
(Thank you Ed Witten for that superstring revolution and your new M-theory!)

(Maldecena!)
(Super-Yang-Mills!)
(Type IIB String!)
Dual! Dual!
(In the AdS/CFT)
(Holography!)

Molecules and atoms
Light and energy
Time and space and matter
All from one united
Theory

Any way you quantize...

Lyrics and arrangement by Tim Blais and A Capella Science
Original music by Queen

Song of the Day: Kacey Musgraves - Merry Go 'Round

I've said it before ... maybe I've lived down south for too long.  I don't listen to country music often, but sometimes I really like it.

Here is the first of two songs that caught my ear when I first heard of them after the recent Country Music Awards show (no, I didn't watch the show, just listened to some of the songs nominated). Apparently these songs were pretty big in country music lately.

Kacey Musgraves - Merry Go 'Round

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZfj2Ir3GgQ