(Update 4th November 2011.We were very sorry to hear of Alan’s death earlier today. A fantastic guy and unmatched friend of gibbons. Rest in peace Alan.)
What better way to spend Christmas than in the company of your favourite gibbons? That’s exactly what my wife Erin and I did on the 26th December 2008, when we made our second visit to the Gibbon Conservation Center at Santa Clarita, California – home to some of the world’s rarest gibbons.
As well as catching up with gibbon families we first encountered in September, and described in this earlier post, I made some sound recordings during this visit, including an extended interview with the Founder and Director of the Center, Alan Mootnick.
I hope you’ll find the resulting podcast, which you can stream or download below, gives an in-depth, candid, yet often humorous insight into the mission of the Gibbon Center, the plight of the gibbon, and the work of a dedicated scientist and hands-on conservationist.
(Please note, a later edit with the interview split down into six shorter sections can be found here)
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60Mb. Approx. 1 hour. Copyright, all rights reserved, 2009, Tim Jones communicatescience.com
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Alan Mootnick, Director Gibbon Conservation Center
If you enjoyed hearing about – and hearing ! – the gibbons of Santa Clarita, and would like to make a donation, you can do so here.
As the year closes, a note of thank you to all those who have visited Zoonomian since its start-up in August. I hope you found something of interest, whether you stumbled across the site accidentally, or if you are one of the known (and even more unknown) regulars who keep checking back. You’re quiet, but you know who you are !
Small World
A special hello to the USA and Canada, and a very special welcome to my first visitor from South America – who just made it before the year is out (see map).
I’m going to be busy flying around and recovering from jet-lag for a bit now – so Happy New Year in advance !
As the last remnants of Christmas turkey fall to sandwich and soup, forget not Bertrand Russell’s musings on the fate of turkeys subscribing to Francis Bacon’s philosophy of inductivist scientific reasoning.
They don’t see it coming (photo WikiCommons)
On his first day at the farm, the turkey noted he was fed at 9.00 am. After this procedure had been repeated for many weeks, the turkey relaxed a bit, safely drawing the conclusion “I am always fed at 9 am”. Regrettably for the turkey, this conclusion was proved wrong on Christmas eve when, rather than being fed, he got his throat cut. Which just goes to show that any number of true observations can still lead to a false conclusion; the turkey’s argument was simply not logical.
It’s never too early to plan for next Christmas, so here is my insightful and environmentally friendly recommendation for next year’s christmas tree.
Araucaria heterophylla. Photo: WikiCommons
Without calculating the detailed carbon footprint of that temporarily living piney off-cut standing beglittered in your lounge, or the plastic alternative you picked up for £20 at Woolies’ terminal sale, it’s probably safe to say both are more environmentally harmful, more expensive, and probably less attractive than the alternative – a living christmas tree.
From my experience this Christmas, I can happily recommend the arboreal company of a Norfolk Island Pine, a handsome 7ft tall in its pot, and supporting all the lights and trimmings you could want. Cometh twelfth night, this tree can, unlike its temporary cousins, be returned to the garden until next year. Or, if you don’t enjoy the favourable climate of Southern California, just keep it indoors like a regular potted plant. Either way – low maintenance, low hassle.
One short post as Christmas Eve draws to a close on the west coast of America.
And a flavourful evening it’s been too, in both the culinary and scientific senses; for tonight I dined at CalTech’s Athenaeum Club in Pasadena, California.
Athenaeum in Pasadena
The first club dinner in February 1931 was attended by Albert Einstein, Robert A. Millikan, and A. A. Michelson; the club has since hosted the likes of Richard Feynman (physicist), David Baltimore (biologist) and Maarten Schmidt (Astronomer). I got through the door on the strength of my father-in-law’s double qualification as Caltech graduate and former Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) employee.
(Chemical) Abstract Dining in the Athenaeum Library
I’ve eaten in the main dining room before, but tonight was especially interesting as we were hosted in one of the more private library rooms. That meant I got to enjoy the somewhat surreal experience of tucking into my prime rib surrounded by the last fifty years’ worth of Chemical Abstracts; food for thought as it were….groan.
Food for thought
Clearly time to stop, take the indigestion tablets, and go to bed.
It was inevitable. The indefinable, yet almost tangible buzz of excitement that has for weeks held cyberspace in a grip of nervous anticipation: it all makes sense now. For yesterday evening, to tumultuous public acclaim, the Zoonomian Science Centre opened its doors to residents of Second Life.
Zoonomian Science Centre in SL
O.K. – if my brother hadn’t monopolised model railway construction when we were kids, maybe I’d have gotten this sort of thing out of my system earlier. But all the same, putting this creation together has been a lot of fun and there is a serious side to it all.
A visitor explores the Conference Floor on opening night
Virtual worlds have been with us for a while, as has their use for promoting interaction in science and technology; and indeed, for science communication.
There are many real world businesses, universities, museums, and even embassies represented in Second Life; most of which you can just turn up to and walk right in. I particularly like NASA’a site, despite their copy restrictions preventing my placing the Saturn V launch vehicle as sentinel to the ZSC. The NASA site is part of what is probably the major nexus for science and technology in Second Life: the SciLands Virtual Continent. The Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Publishing also have a substantial SL presence at the Elucian Islands – Second Nature – which hosts events such as the recent Virtual Conference on Climate Change and CO2 Storage, held in association with my own Imperial College.
Second Life is the best known virtual world, but there are dozens of others – some, like OpenSim, snapping at its heels.
Entrance lobby (I'm most comfortable constructing as a meerkat)
I’ve previously discussed Second Life here, in the context of societies with boundless resource; and most recently here, when I first bought land and installed a giant gibbon on it. (If anybody is missing the gibbon, don’t worry, she and others are likely to return with a vengeance.) In the former post, I referred to owner Linden’s claim that 70,000 thousand residents were ‘in-world’ at any one time; I’ve seen between 45,000 and 75,000, so that seems realistic.
Entrance lobby and conference level
So, much more importantly – what am I going to do with this space?
As a conventional museum with exhibits, there are no limits – save those dictated by the bounds of copyright and creative ingenuity; but mainly cost – of time and money. Media: such as web pages, music, and movies, can be streamed into the Centre via two media panels. The default is set to this blog, with which you can interact from within SL.
There is also the potential for groups to meet up at the centre to share media materials, films, podcasts etc, and to hold mini-conferences to which a broader public might be invited.
Conference Level
And I guess this brings us to the big difference bewteen a straight web page interaction and an interaction in Second Life. SL and its ilk are spaces where people who are geographically far apart in the real world can meet to share content and have discussions. You might say you could do that sitting at your PC? But then of course that’s exactly where you would be. The claim is that a virtual world gives you more degrees of freedom for expression. For sure, if during an SL discussion at the conference table, a guest gets up and orders a drink from the bar (did I not mention the bar?), then spends the rest of the meeting pacing around, that would send a certain kind of message.
If you want to visit the Zoonomian Science Centre, you will need to register for free at Second Life and get yourself a name. Then come to this location in the Haddath Region. Haddath has ‘mature’ status – so adults only please. The Centre is normally open to all, but just come back later if not; it just means I’m working on the place and don’t want to jump out of my skin when someone walks up behind me and starts chatting.
Of course, the main pupose of the Zoonomian Science Centre has been as a learning exercise for me; Second Nature can relax after all. That said: “from small acorns……”
Oh yes – if you are reading this at the Centre…..Welcome ! Enjoy!
With Christmas upon us, reflect if you will on how the greatest pleasure can result from the simplest of gifts. Babies, and children below the age of two, invariably delight more in a present’s packaging than its content; and things don’t improve much with age.
World's First Christmas Card
Nor do value and satisfaction correlate (value is in any case an alien concept to many children). A wind-up torch at £20 is of moderate interest to my young nephew; but far more engaging is the squishy polythene tube, filled with a shimmering emulsion and impossible to hold, at £1.50.
Unsurprisingly, you won’t be hearing any appeals for simplicity from the toy industry. If Amazon UK’s Top 10 toy list is anything to go by, it’s going to be a Christmas in front of the monitor for many households. Six of the ten favorites are either game console or game related, three are iPoddy things, and, worryingly for a nation already rushing to obesity, the number five slot is taken by a chocolate fountain. Also selling well are various robotic animals, Wall-E related goods, and the ubiquitous Guitar Hero.
That’s a pretty technological Christmas then. How did people ever get by without all this stuff? Cue the nineteenth century Christmas……
Transistors, integrated circuits, and laser technology were absent from the Victorian toy maker’s toolkit; but in the latter half of the nineteenth century, science and technology based toys and ‘fancy goods’ were, as today, a staple draw for vendors at Christmas time. They appeared in the special seasonal catalogues of vendors with names we have long forgotten: Theobald & Co. of Kensington, Shoolbred & Co on the Tottenham Court Road, Parkins & Gotto of Oxford Street, and the Economic Electrical Supply Company on the Edgeware Road. More familiar, and still to be found on Regent Street today, is Hamley’s – then ‘Hamley’s Model Doll and Toy Warehouse’ . With roots going back to 1760 Holborn, the firm was well established by1849, when a Henry Charles Harrod opened a small grocery store in London’s Knightsbridge district.
Animatronics were the rage in the 1880’s. Customers to Parkins & Gotto, if sufficiently motivated by the mechanised smoking fisherman that greeted them at the entrance, could take away their own mechanical wonder in the form of an elephant, capable of walking with children on its back; theirs for £20. Hamley’s also offered animated animals and birds, some with sound effects; and a mechanical fish that could swim in water. One of the more complex devices involved a clockwork polar bear chasing a sailor up a ladder, with another sailor fighting ‘the brute’ off (indulge in a modern vision with Palin and McCain substituting for the sailors). Theobald’s offered an electrified clock case that gave a shock when opened. Toys based on optical effects were popular, like the zeotrope, that relied on persistance of vision to give the impression of continuous moving images; and the Rainbow Bubble, a demonstration of Newton’s Rings between soap bubbles.
Zeotrope
Indoor fireworks, indeed fireworks in general, were a popular Christmas treat. Pharaoh’s Serpents, known to us perhaps as ‘snakes in the grass’, ejected copious combustion products in the form of sinuous worms. Mid-nineteenth century health and safety pundits, popularly perceived as lax by today’s standards, warned of the toy’s perilous main ingredient – hydrated mercuric sulpho-cyanide. We might note, with some irony given how global trade later developed, one contemporary journalist’s observation that: “this plaything has had its day in this country, although the number sent to China and Japan is said to be enormous.” How we chuckled.
Other firey stocking fillers of the Victorian age, guaranteed to turn any modern health & safety inspector apoplectic, included Flash Paper – a commercial spin-off of Schonbein’s recent invention of Gun Cotton. Big deal, flash paper is available today; but not so Crocodiles Tears or Larmes de Diable – which produced a beautiful light show when thrown into water; what else from beads of potassium metal in a water soluble coating.
Magic Photographs were another entertaining Christmas novelty. Popular in the 1880’s, these were featureless white papers yielding an image when moistened with water. Made by treating silver images that had been developed, fixed, but not toned, with mercury bichloride, an invisible image of white silver chloride on white mercury chloride was produced. The image could be revived by soaking the paper, which included a backing sheet impregnated with sodium hyposulphite, in ordinary water – magic!
And finally – as today, toys were seen as educational; but, perhaps anticipating the worries today’s parents feel when their kids pull away from them in matters digital, there were concerns. This quote, from an 1866 edition of the Lancet, comments on the educational value of toys, while playfully alluding to the danger that an over-inquiring mind might present to the establishment:
“If the word “science” mean that which is known, and if the term “knowledge” indicate that which is demonstrated and understood, then a child who comprehends the true story of any half dozen of the new scientific toys would be a serious antagonist to tackle in a discussion. It is probable, however, that the rising generation is content with the charming results, and inclined to fight shy of all explanations. This is lucky for pastors and masters who might be rather bothered by close questioning………”
(This article was originally published at conservationtoday.org)
We can all take action to help combat global warming. Here is something for the gardeners amongst you to think about.
Direct man-made CO2 emissions are problematic enough, but they are only part of a complex interplay of sources and sinks for greenhouse gases that is still beyond our full understanding. For example, there has for some time now been concern over frozen peat bogs thawing and releasing stored up methane, locked away for millenia, and far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Leave it in the ground
But peat is our friend too; and you can help by leaving it where it is.
Why? Because peat is largely made up of dead plants, rich in captured carbon that has been prevented, due to the moist air-free bog environment, from fully decomposing back to CO2. Drain the bogs, distrurb or harvest the peat, and the carbon recombines with oxygen in the air, taking us back to square one.
The National Trust are at the forefront of public consciousness raising about peat in the UK, illustrating the issue with numbers that are far from intuitive. For example, the Trust estimates there are 100kg of carbon locked in every cubic metre of peat; which in CO2 terms is like driving a car for 2000 miles. In their report, Natures’s Capital, we learn peatlands are the UK’s single largest carbon reserve, amounting to around 3 billion tonnes, or equivalent to 20 years’ worth of man-made CO2 emissions. Across the globe, although peat covers only 3 per cent of the global land surface, the amount of carbon stored within it is enormous – equivalent to twice that of all the world’s forests combined.
As well as dead plants, peat contains so-called ‘Black Carbon’; that is carbon captured following moorland burning. In the UK, The British Geological Survey are researching how this and other soil carbons behave, and their likely impact on climate change. Only last month, a fascinating paper in Nature Geoscience highlighted how inaccurate knowledge about the ratio of soil black carbon to organic carbon in Australia – with implications on the global scale – can result in significant (almost 25%) over-estimation of CO2 release from global warming feedback mechanisms. On a planet-wide scale, the possible swings are massive.
So – back to what we can do. First, don’t forget its not just about climate change. Peat bogs in the UK are also an important habitat for wildlife and a source of colourful diversity for us humans. I’ve passed many a happy hike literally bouncing along on Peak District peat.
You might like to get involved in one of the remediation efforts run by the National Trust. And if you’re a domestic gardener – as a group consuming seventy percent of horticultural peat in the UK, and all from drained bogs that are killed in the process of its extraction – you can make a direct impact by simply not using it. And, as the UK accounts for 8% of the world’s northern peatlands, collectively holding 30% of all soil-based carbon, you have the potential to make a real global impact in your own back garden – as it were. The golden rules are:
Don’t buy peat
Only buy pot plants bedded in non-peaty compost
Quiz your garden centre on its compost/peat policy; share this article!
Support local wildlife trusts who are working to regenerate degraded mossed areas
Encourage your family and friends to do likewise
And write to your MP
Lastly, if you want to get more involved on the policy and campaigning side, get in touch with The Peatlands Campaign Consortium, who have been a major influence on the government in setting targets for reduced peat use.
What do Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, and Tim Jones have in common?
I leave you to cogitate over the more obvious parallels in literary and political acumen shared by these well known London gentlemen – they are irrelevant to the point. More pertinent is that we have all four, variously over two centuries, enjoyed roast beef in the Grand Divan at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand; roast beef served in the traditional manner: carved at the table, with a good dollop of coarsely shredded horseradish sauce.
Stylish dining in the Grand Divan at Simpsons in the Strand (Photo:Tim Jones)
For me, the recent occasion for this most English of dining extravagances was my wife’s birthday. She with whom, amongst the chandeliers and paneled oak, I once again shared a fulfillment that only the stimulating permeation of allyl isothiocyanate into nasal mucosa can deliver.
In truth, I had no idea what caused the alarming pungency of the horseradish, and no amount of distracted shuffling of fork about the savoy cabbage and roast potatoes helped explain the strange sensation – quite unlike the ‘hotness in the mouth’ of a curry or the ponderous burn of ginger. So what’s it all about?
CapsaicinAllyl isothiocyanate
It turns out the active ingredient in horseradish – allyl isothiocyanate – is a volatile irritant. Being volatile, it can quickly get to the nasal passages where the endings of the trigeminal nerve complex come close to the surface. On the other hand, the main active compound in chili and curry, capsaicin, is a non-volatile, oil-soluble, molecule that travels most readily through the lipid membranes of the oral cavity; it makes your mouth and tongue feel hot. Interestingly, the menthol found in mint is both volatile and oil soluble, giving us that difficult to describe sensation of heating and cooling in both nose and mouth.
I also discovered during my research that allyl isothiocyanate is used to make adhesive for sailmaking, and stumbled across this patent describing the applications of horseradish as a treatment for nasal and sinus dysfunction, delivered by literally squirting the stuff up your nose. Something to try between courses maybe?
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