Year's end

It's the end of the palindromic year, a year in which librarians became radicals and radicals became patriots. Outside the reading-room windows, the Mall is becoming very gray. There are rumors of a New Year's snow.

The old year is a time for summing up, and the articles I blundered into today seem to flock around the theme of explanations: How does the mind work? Why do we do what we do? In a world that seems to be sliding into irrationality, these are problems of more than academic interest. For instance:

In 1947, B. F. Skinner starved some pigeons and put them in a box. Every 15 seconds food appeared, remained for a few seconds, then vanished. Faced with a world beyond their control, the birds developed bizarre stylized behavior: they spun in circles, bobbed their heads, or swung their bodies to an unheard rhythm. Each bird had its own ritual. Skinner had no doubt that they were developing the avian equivalent of superstitions, trying to force the fickle food to reappear. This experiment was cited by Guardian writer David Newnham in his description of a visit to a psychic. He's an educated man, and he knows how she is working--the standard mix of platitudes and cold reading, with a few wild guesses tossed into the dark:

But when she casually drops the name Claire into the conversation, I want to know more. There's nobody called Claire looming large in my life, I tell her. "Claire," she says again. "I'll just leave that with you."

A good, professional psychic worker, in other words. But if "Claire" appears during the next few months, Mr. Newnham will have a hard time suppressing the chill on his spine.

We need predictability, and we need explanations. In a New York Times article, psychiatrist Anna Fels tells how patients whose emotions are being driven by chemical imbalances or electrical stimulation will create stories to explain and justify their reactions. Much of psychiatry, she says, is uncovering the old and now inappropriate roots for the stories we tell ourselves. They may have been useful once, but now they lack survival value.

Survival value is also cited in Natalie Angier's NYT article on the origin of religions. In a pre-scientific society, religion provided the stories which explained the world. The stories spread like memetic microbes, competing for human minds. They have inspired stunningly beautiful ethical and artistic creations. They have also excused some of the worse excesses of human depravity.

Worlds change: winter slides down to cold and snow. Not all microbes benefit their hosts; and some stories, though long beloved, may have lost their survival value.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:38 PM

Off for Christmas

The pinniped is heading up to Baltimore and down to North Carolina for the holidays. The weblog will resume on December 30, or thereabouts.

A pleasant holiday season to all and sundry. Thanks for stopping in.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 4:58 PM

The Bear. Again.

The "Ted Heuvelmans kills world-record Alaska brown bear" story is still alive and well, judging by number of people who find this page while searching for it. Today a kind reader sent me this link to a story from the Anchorage Daily News. This does seem to be the real tale behind the photos, especially given this confirmation from the air base involved.

Airman Theodore Winnen (not Heuvelmans) is an airman at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks. He shot the bear in October 2001 on Hinchinbrook Island in Prince William Sound. His party was there to hunt deer, but they had no objection to bagging a bear if one showed up. This bear had the bad fortune to cross their path. The actual beast, though impressive, is not the monster reported in the urban legend. It weighed between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds, and the hide measured 10' 6" from nose to tail. The skull score (the length and width combined) of 28 8/16" puts it significantly below the North American record of 30 12/16", especially since the measurement was made before the skull had dried. Winnen does, though, expect it will end up in the Boone and Crockett top 150. Not the world record, in other words; just a very large bear which ended up as a very large rug.

As for the Internet legend--I still suspect that "Ted Heuvelmans" is an homage to the late cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:28 PM

In memoriam Bigfoot

Bigfoot is dead. Ray L. Wallace, the man who created the legendary cryptid in 1958 by walking around a construction site in giant carved feet, died November 26 at the age of 84. [more]

The revelation of Wallace's involvement (by his son, Michael Wallace) was not news to anyone who had followed the story closely. In an article in Strange magazine, Mark Chorvinsky noted the odd way in which Wallace's name kept turning up when one tracked the provenance of Bigfoot sightings. In another article, Chorvinsky investigated the provenance of the Bigfoot suit used in the famous Patterson film. [more]


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:21 PM

Snow obsessions

Wilson A. Bentley spent half a lifetime photographing snowflakes. The Smithsonian rejected his collection of photographs, on which his book was based. Now Buffalo, New York, a major snow capital (though second to Syracuse), will feature Bentley's work in its "Winter Wonders" exhibit.

Another city obsessed with snow is Asahikawa, Japan, home of the Austrian-inspired Snow Crystal Museum.

More snow crystals can be seen on Cal Tech's snow crystals site, which includes instructions on growing your own.

Posted on MetaFilter on November 26;
thanks to those who commented.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:26 PM

From space, a total solar eclipse looks like a black spot painted on the Earth's surface. The crew of the International Space Station observed the December 4 solar eclipse over Africa and the Indian Ocean.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 10:07 AM

Hey, if you don't want it, we know someone who does....

The Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation, which withdrew an offer of $38 million to the Smithsonian earlier this year after controversy about creative control, has offered $100 million to Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The grant will be used for an eight-acre plaza which will link the Kennedy Center with the rest of DC, from which it is now separated by several major roads and freeways. The full project is estimated to cost $650 million.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 1:33 PM

Snow. No Snow Day

The weatherman came through; the government didn't. Although schools were closed throughout the DC area, the federal government made do with an "unscheduled leave" policy. Pleading I couldn't make it to the Metro would have been unbearably woosy, so I pulled the dusty snow-boots from the back of the closet and crunched down two blocks of near-virgin snow, with more snow gathering on my hat and shoulders. Roland and Reinaldo, the Taft Bridge lions, were wearing white blankets.

I spent much of the day admiring the Arctic expanse of the Mall from the reading room windows. One lovely moment: a grand squadron of Canada geese flew in from west to east, passing directly above the slumping snow on the glass ceiling. You could just see them through the melting cracks, so close you could count their wing-feathers.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:13 PM

Snow, receding

I'm going to sue the weatherman for breach of promise. Yesterday, they were promising us snow. "Heavy snow" was the phrase used, in all its evocative splendor. Heavy snow all Thursday. And enough of it rolling in the night before to nearly guarantee a federal Snow Day.

The District is wimpy about snow. Drop an inch of it overnight, and they close the schools and dismiss the federal government. But, since it's never actually a blizzard, you can wander around the Zoo in your red woolly muffler enjoying the vision of bison-in-snow-globes. Or you can sit inside with a pot of cocoa, a bowl of popcorn and the PlayStation, while white feathers drift past the windows. I was definitely looking forward to it.

Now the forecasts are revised. Although the Carolinas and southern Virginia are getting properly whitened, we in DC are down to a chance of flurries late tonight, and two to four inches arriving in showers tomorrow. In other words, no Snow Day--just a miserable slippery evening commute.

That weatherman owes me. Big time.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:29 PM

Beast tales

The flavor of the day seems to be unrelated animal stories. So, with out further ado:

A collie in Hereford, England, chased a thrown stick and returned carrying a live hand grenade, which was disarmed by Army bomb experts. The dog's owner remarked, "Shadow is always coming back from the river with stuff -- but usually just rubber balls."

Here in DC, the National Zoo is reevaluating its care of giraffes after losing both its adult animals in one year. The giraffes were killed, in part, by unsuspected dental problems; it is notoriously hard to get giraffes to submit to medical inspections.

Back in England, a foul-mouthed parrot has moved into a West Yorkshire church. The escaped African Grey is roosting in the bell-tower with the pigeons. The church's rector first became aware of the bird when it told him to "F--- off!"

And, in Shimosuwa, Japan, animal-control personnel are searching for a rogue macaque which has bitten 23 women. Local officials have assured reporters that the monkey simply finds women easy targets. "It wasn't, of course, because it liked women."


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:07 PM