Category Archives: General Science

Are We Gods To Them?

I’ve never heard of this, but apparently others have:

…as I was about to step out the door, I looked down and there was a dead baby kitten on our mat. The mama cat is wild and has never let us anywhere near her. A couple of hours later my hubby went to take out the trash and there was another dead kitten in the same place. He buried them out in the field. I just went outside for a smoke, and there is another one, that makes three.

My question is, since the mama cat is wild, why would she keep bringing her dead babies and putting them on our doorstep? Is that normal for cats?

So one commenter had a thought, which occurred to me as well:

Mother cats can be clearly seen to actually *care* (emotionally) for their kittens, and will fight to the death to protect them, and will risk death to save them – anybody remember “Scarlet” the fire-cat?

Why this mom-cat would bring her dead kittens to your door… hard to tell. Possibly she thinks that you might be able to bring them back.

Wow. Just realized what a heartbreaking thought *that* is.

Yes. Our cat treats us as her bed and her slaves, but she also knows that ultimately, we have a lot of power over her. So one wonders what they think of us, and just how much power they think we have, should we, in our beneficence, choose to wield it.

Welcome To The Family

Well, actually, it’s a whole new family. Of crustacean:

The animal is white and 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) long — about the size of a salad plate.

In what Segonzac described as a “surprising characteristic,” the animal’s pincers are covered with sinuous, hair-like strands.

Wonder what it tastes like?

How Do You Enforce It?

I agree with Ron Bailey’s column on Bush’s health-care proposals, until I get to his proposed solution:

My advice to President Bush on how really to jumpstart consumer-driven health care: mandatory private health insurance. Poor Americans would be offered a voucher with which they would buy private health coverage. Such vouchers could be paid for by abolishing Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Programs….Mandatory private health insurance would avoid the problem of adverse selection, provide insurance for the currently uninsured and make consumer-driven health care work for every American.

While this would be (in theory) a vast improvement over the current employer-driven mess, there’s one problem, which is why I say “in theory”: How is it enforced? What happens to people who don’t do it? With mandatory auto insurance, one in theory revokes the privilege of driving if one doesn’t obey the law, but what’s the equivalent for health insurance?

I suppose the libertarian response is, “their tough luck.” It’s mine, too, but it doesn’t seem very politically correct, or from a policy standpoint, politically palatable.

Alfred Hitchcock, Call Your Office

Apparently our ancestors had more to worry about than bears, snakes and sabre tooths:

…small human ancestors known as hominids had to survive being hunted not only by large predators on the ground but by fearsome raptors that swooped from the sky, said Lee Berger, a senior paleoanthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand.

Apparently the Taung Baby was snatched and killed by an eagle.

I hate when that happens.

That’s The Least Of His Problems

Robert Bakker says that King Kong wouldn’t be able to get enough to eat.

There are more serious issues than that. Even if he could get enough to eat, for a body with that much mass to move that fast, the heat generated would be much greater than could be radiated out through the skin (mass goes up as the cube of the major dimension, whereas surface area only goes up as the square), particularly through that fur coat, so he’d cook from the inside if he maintained the kind of activity levels presumably depicted. Also, he wouldn’t be able to maintain his own weight on those (relatively) spindly legs, once scaled up to that size–they’d splinter like toothpicks.

No point in seeing the movie, folks–it’s just not realistic…

[Via Mark Whittington]