Depressing thoughts on pets

UPDATE: MSNBC wrote about the same thing I was writing about the other night. They mentioned Jon Katz, whom I think is the coolest contemporary writer on pets. (Temple Grandin would be the coolest contemporary writer on lifestock. Wildlife...dunno.)

This afternoon Steve and I were making lunch and Lina was standing around meowing and I said to her, "Every moment someone's not paying attention to you is a tragedy, isn't it?" Then later Steve's friend Christine came over to visit - she has two kittens - and they both agreed that that's how cats think.

But I don't remember my brother's cat Mousie acting like that most of the time. Like most Malaysian cats, he was an outdoor cat, going where he liked and coming home for naps and dinner. And then I realize that as predators with a natural home range of a couple square km's (IIRC) most housecats must be bored out of their minds.

Things like the cat macros/LOLcats internet phenomenon illustrate it well - the kind of infantilism that pets stimulate even relatively sane people into displaying. It's a failure to treat a certain class of animals as "not brethren...other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth" (Henry Beston), but solely as screens to project our emotions on.

Breeding animals into disgusting and bizarre shapes, trying to compensate for their confinement by showering them with toys, and believing that they'll perish without premium diets... This for animals whose association with and use to humans originated from the application of their talents in hunting and scavenging. The modern worldview on pets has taken two great little predators and turned them from humans' commensals into parasites.

Man, I should go to bed.

Bailey's Irish Oooooh yeaaaaahhh

PK drug problem

I'm not a fan of ultraconservative American organizations like Focus on the Family, but there was an article titled "Real Life for Second-Generation Christians" in one of their fliers which I thought was totally relevant and funny:

But there are challenges when faith has always been an assumed part of your life. One second-generation Christian said he had a drug problem growing up--his father was a pastor and he got "drug" to church on Sunday morning and "drug" to church on Sunday night and "drug" to church on Wednesday night.

A while ago I visited the home of the senior pastor at the church I attend, with a bunch of other random churchgoers. At one point a twentysomething woman sneaked into the back of the living area and was getting something out of the fridge when someone turned around and asked "Who's that?" The "Oh Dad don't make me introduce myself" look on her face was painfully familiar and for the first time in my life it wasn't on mine =D

I heart the BBC

Seriously, I just heard this:

[Woman's voice]: ...has been out to sea feeding on fish, shrimp, and krill which he vomits up to feed his chick. So we've made a penguin vomit so you can see what he's been eating.
[Man's voice, background, indistinct]: Gross...
[Man's voice]: And it's coming up later in the program!

You know you're becoming a poxvirologist when...

Gah. I re-read Stephen King's Carrie last night and every time they talked about the "TK gene", instead of "telekinesis" I thought "thymidine kinase".

It really isn't as scary as it was when I was 16...

XKCD on: The problem with Wikipedia

SO TRUE.

(from xkcd)

Victoria's Show-through

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Be aware that if you buy a "bra top" garment from Victoria's Secret, they do not, in fact, have bra tops. What they have is an additional layer of whatever fabric the outside of the garment is made of, which means that your titties (or men, if you're buying for a lady friend, her titties) will show through. I ordered this tank (the first thing I ever bought from VS; the girl who lived here before me was getting catalogues) because it was on sale, but I'm sure as heck not wearing it without a strapless bra underneath.

Wow...posting photos of myself trying to look hot...who am I turning into, XiaXue or Furong Jie Jie?

Poor little devils

So, now that I've gotten my 3rd and final Pathology 750 assignment grade back, I'm going to post the first one, which I'm proud of now but at the time was making me sleepless for a week. Since it was my first big assignment after not having had any science classes for 2 years, I was sick with worry after submitting it.

When I logged on to my uni's course content system and saw the 50/50 grade, it was a nearly orgasmic moment: I screamed. ^_^

Performing well academically makes me paranoid, though: it can't be that I'm that smart, I must be screwing up and picking all the easy classes. Low self esteem konon >D

Anyway, a quick run-down of the problem: Tasmanian devils get a peculiar cancer called Devil Facial Tumour Disease, which makes horrendous growths that swell, rot, and eventually cause them to starve to death. Theory is that the etiologic agent (i.e. thingy that causes the disease) is the tumour itself - since devils fight pretty much whenever they meet each other, chunks of tumour cells break off, stick to the new host, and grow on it.

People think this is possible because devils went through a population bottleneck at some point, so they're very inbred and therefore don't mount an immune response to each other's cells. Contrast this to humans who need to take powerful immune-suppression drugs if they receive organ transplants, even from relatives.

For the question we were asked to come up with an alternate theory (since reduced genetic diversity doesn't automatically translate into an epidemic of transmissible cancer) involving "the failure of the MHC class I antigen processing and presentation machinery". I racked my brains about it for the better part of a week until having an "eureka" moment that it was similar to something else we'd discussed in class - Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour (great disease name, tells you exactly what it is).

Download a .pdf of the essay here.

I was really afraid that my answer was too "off" to be acceptable, but surprisingly the prof liked it. Anyway, I'm sort of proud of my answer because at the time I wrote it there wasn't any information out there to really confirm the popular model.

Although it turns out that someone's gotten around to testing devils' immune reactions against each other (scroll down to "A Contagious Cancer") and they really don't recognize other devils' cells as foreign.

Mixed lymphocyte reactions were then undertaken to investigate whether the Tasmanian devil has the correct genes to allow recognition of foreign cells. This was performed by mixing lymphocytes from many devils to see if they reacted to each other. The results from these studies clearly showed that devils failed to recognise cells from other devils as different. This provides strong evidence that a lack of genetic diversity contributes to why the cancer is infectious.

There goes my pretty theory. The scriptwriter for Stargate SG-1 who had a character say "I'm a scientist. It's just as exciting for my theories to be proved wrong as to be proved right," clearly hasn't talked to any of us recently...

Too bad the prof didn't comment on my really really alternative theory of DFTD etiology (or aetiology if you're British): Martian cancer rays!

Steve's random thought of the day

This is the kind of thing that happens when you date a gamer:

[21:50] Steve: you there kitty?
[21:53] me: sorry, was in the toilet.
[21:53] me: what?
[21:53] Steve: just had an interesting thought
[21:53] Steve: all christians are necromancers
[21:53] Steve: we all follow an undead guy
[21:53] me: LOL
[21:54] me: you've been playing too much rpgs

Facebook error message

Well, it's an improvement over "404: Not Found"...

Funniest fire system test announcement EVAH

Hi-
Would it be possible to change the time of the alarm check to before 1:00 pm or after about 2:10 pm? I'm giving my thesis defense talk from 1-2:00 in Rm 101 and it might be hard to talk over the alarm. Thanks for finding out.
Sincerely,
Chris

On Fri, 11 May 2007 13:31:03 -0500
Tom wrote:
> Hello all,
> There will be a test of the fire alarm system at the facility on Tuesday, May 15th sometime between 1:00p and 2:00p. This will not be a fire drill, but rather the campus will be checking for the proper function of the fire alarm system. The warning alarms will sound for up to 5 minutes.
> Thank you.
>

LOLcats

I'm generally against anthropomorphism (e.g. I like Watership Down much better than Redwall) but sometimes it's appropriate...oh gosh I just discovered lolcats today. 60+ pages of funny captions on gut-splittingly funny pictures. Like this one:
As well as some equally funny non-cat pictures:

They also have a link to the LolCat Builder site where you can upload your own image, enter captions, and the site will generate a capped image for you.

So yeah, I've been posting a lot of Lina pics, but this is what I submitted to I Can Has Cheezburger:

On the agenda

Agar-oops

"...is a total idiot!"

My ears perk up. Who's Keith complaining about? Anything for entertainment on a slow afternoon like this. Angela turns as he comes into the office. "Who is a total idiot?"

"Kris!"
"What did he do?"
"He overlaid those rat cells with agar but he didn't take the medium off first!"

Angela and I start giggling. Keith flings his hands in the air. "Someone needs to hit that kid in the head with a rubber mallet."

Ok, so it's only funny if you're a virologist... I'll try to illustrate later, I've got my drawing tablet back now.

Which early church father are you?

I'm not even sure who Origen is or what his positions were and since I have homework tonight I'm definitely not going to start reading the wiki about him.

You’re Origen! You do nothing by half-measures. If you’re going to read the Bible, you want to read it in the original languages. If you’re going to teach, you’re going to reach as many souls as possible, through a proliferation of lectures and books. If you’re a guy and you’re going to fight for purity … well, you’d better hide the kitchen shears. Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

I'm not sure what this has to do with it either, but under the question "Your guilty pleasure:" I picked "Self-mutilation". =D

The perils of poor housing

"...Spemann's organizer was discovered by Hans Spemann's grad student Hilde Mangold. Spemann got the Nobel Prize. Hilde lived in crappy grad student housing and killed herself^*. You can't win a Nobel posthumously. Moral of the story, if you want to win the Nobel, don't live in crappy housing."

- one of the Path 750 lecturers

*Gilbert's Developmental Biology says Mangold died when the gas stove in her apartment exploded. I guess that's why most crappy apartments now have electric stoves...to preserve the lives of potential Nobel laureates. =P