Dead of 3,500-Year Old
Senator Is Still Unsolved

It’s been almost week now since the oldest tree in the U.S. burned to the ground in Florida. Investigators still have no idea what felled the 118-ft. tall bald cypress. But we should all be mourning the passing of a contemporary of Alexander, the Great, in our backyard.
Some would say, though, so what? Rainforests are being burned all over the world at record speeds and they’re much older. The oldest is still standing in Malaysia after 130 million years, which makes the Amazon, at about 50 million years of age, a far too-young-to-die forest.
Perhaps that’s why an increasing number of botanists are saying, screw it, we’re dropping the Latin. Meaning that the official procedure of naming plant species in Latin is getting in the way of quickly identifying new species.
Sadly, more and more are not even lasting that brief time, in ecological terms, that the Senator did. According to researchers, there may be as many as 100,000 plant species that are not yet known to science, waiting to be cataloged. That is, if we can find and describe them in time. Besides, Latin is already a dead tongue.
FLORA GENERALIS
What botanists fear the most is deforestation, invasive species and climate change, all of which represent immediate threats to up to one-third of all species on the brink of extinction within the next 50 years. Such species need to be all fully documented while they’re still around.
Which means that, besides more academics needed to cover such a vast and demanding field, more expeditions to remote locations are also necessary, more professional trackers, public funding and general interest in rescue forests and plant species before they’re all gone for good.
Thus, the additional requirement for naming them in Latin before making them officially known, a rule that’s been in place since the early 1900s, does get in the way. It’s a painstaking, outdated and anti-practical process, since it requires a completely different set of skills from botanists and researchers alike.
Lately, though there’s been a welcome movement towards simplification, and scientists are no longer expected to write the descriptions in Latin, only the names. But even if that rule is, eventually, relaxed, there’s obviously much more to do.

OLDEST RAINFOREST
In the jungles of Malaysia, for example, a mere hectare of the luscious Taman Negara may be home to an estimated 14,000 species of plants, 200 mammals and 240 types of trees. Great part of such flora and fauna hasn’t been properly classified yet.
Add to those, between 200 to 300 species of birds and thousands of insects making their lives on the jungle floor. And a number of native populations spread out throughout its forests, some having settled there as far back as 10 thousand years.
If the Senator was a contemporary of Alexander, this rainforest was born with the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era, but has survived their demise, and a few Ice Ages on its own. And it may be better protected by Malaysia as a national treasure, than the Amazon is by the countries that share it.
Still, ancient natural beauties, survivors of multiple planetary cataclysms and brutal environmental changes have proved to be no match to our own destructive power, so no one is counting its blessing just yet.
Much of the recent increase in the Amazon’s deforestation may have had to do with Brazil’s economic growth, some say. Malaysia and neighboring Southeast Asian countries are still struggling to get a foothold on their own development and fight against poverty.
As such, the rationale goes, the economic value of their native lands hasn’t been fully realized yet. Which is something that environmentalists sincerely hope that it continues to be so.

DEAD OF A FRIEND
Economic development doesn’t seem to have played such a big part in the case of the suddenly young, sadly missed cypress in Florida. The tree had been standing tall in a park since 1927, the year it was named after Senator M. O. Overstreet, who donated the land to Seminole County.
As such, it was relatively protected, which doesn’t mean to say it hasn’t faced off some formidable nemesis in its time.
Nearly 18 feet in diameter, it braved the elements through thousands of years before any man was around. It survived logging epidemics, which claimed many of the giant trees that once stood in the county, and endured centuries of hurricanes, including one in 1925 that lopped off 40 feet from the top.
That’s why arson is still being considered a possibility for its untimely death. An unintentional cigarette butt, thrown casually by a passerby. Or even a strike of lightning, which may have happened as long as two weeks ago. Senator, as most old trees are, was hollow in its center.
Now that it’s gone, children who are brought to the park on field trips to hear tales about the Florida of old, with swamps and Indians and plenty of animals, have one more story to be told: about a very tall tree that beat all odds, became the country’s oldest, and was killed by a flash of fire.

Mad Colors, Invisible Hues
& a Boy Who Sees in the Dark

A lot of misunderstanding can follow a simple question: Tell me what you see. When it comes to our so called shared reality, each one of us seems to bear witness to a different set of shapes and colors.
Wars were fought over the hue of someone’s skin, for crying out loud. To further complicate things, there’s now research on color preferences of the insane, and light frequencies you simply can’t see.
Ah, yes, and then there’s that Chinese boy too.
Without delving too deep into the chiaroscuro world of pictorial reality (you liked that?), let’s just say that, as far as what we know about cognitive vision, what one sees is a complex, manufactured composite of light and shadow, made sense by information gathered by the person’s brain.
In other words, if you haven’t ‘learned’ how to see, even with a set of fully functioning eyes, you won’t be able to make sense out of what’s ahead of you. Devices that have been developed to ‘restore’ vision to blind people are usually deemed a nightmare by those they are supposed to help.
Time to invoke that old, beaten Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant. By touching it, each man built a completely different description of the animal. Their experience wouldn’t improve much if they could suddenly see, judging by what we know now. We admit, this is not a straight-to-the-point example but when it comes to vision, what really is?
MAD ABOUT COLORS
There are many reasons why the 1931 research “Color Preference in the Insane,” by Dr. Siegfried Katz, was important. At the time, for example, lobotomy was still an accepted treatment for schizophrenia. In fact, the procedure involving cutting nerve fibers from the frontal lobe of the brain, where emotions are generated, would grant the 1949 Nobel Peace prize to Portuguese doctor Egus Moniz.
So kudos to the good doctor Dr. Katz, working at the New York State Psychiatric Hospital, for having chosen alternative ways to make mental patients “less agitated and aggressive.”
For his study, he tested 134 hospitalized patients and their reactions to six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. The colors were numbered and placed on a piece of cardboard that would be presented to each subject for him or her to choose.
Blue was the most popular color, except to those who were at the hospital for three or more years. Men favored green, but female patients were divided on green, red or violet as a second choice.
Red as first choice got 16% of the votes by manic-depressives, and 12% by patients with dementia. The study went on with other, still baffling, conclusions.

NOTHING TO DO WITH IT
Dr. Katz foresaw some practical applications for his study, in the furnishings of living quarters, for example. But it could’ve benefited from more research in the intervening years. Apart from a maker of hospital uniforms, which publishes a list of most popular colors (yes, blue is still popular), not much has been done about it.
In the 1980s, teams at the Emporia State University and at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, did conduct a followup on the subject. Their conclusions, though, all but debunked the findings of Dr. Katz.
They found no “clear-cut relationship between color and psychiatric illness,” and even questioned the use of color in diagnosis. And that was that. For all they cared, those patients who showed preference for some colors over others were, in all likelihood, well, insane.
As for us, color us lazy but never crazy for keeping going back to tap into the Improbable Research site’s bottomless pit of humorous but dead serious scientific tales. Let us praise and thank those enlightened folks and their off-kilter take on things that never cease to tickle us.

WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE
Then again, we’re easily tickled. Take a current debate, for example, over whether there’s a whole class of colors the human eye can not see. They’re even called ‘forbidden colors.’ Who knew?
Many people, it turns out. It’s been quite some time since Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue are known to exist. We just can’t imagine how they look like.
If someone says they exist but you can’t see them, do they still deserve to be named? Apparently so, and no one needs to be a lumber to understand that the noise about them was probably heard somewhere.
According to scientists, those two colors are composed of pairs of hues of which light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, and that makes them virtually impossible to be seen simultaneously. It’s all related to the way we perceive color, of course.
When incoming red light, for example, reaches the eye, it fires ‘opponent neurons’ in the retina, which tell the brain that we’re looking at something red. But green light inhibits those neurons, and that makes the brain to decide that it’s seeing green instead, not red.
We could go on and on about the discriminative abilities of the brain for choosing both what to see and, by extension, what to feel out of every instance of waking life. It makes hundreds of thousands of such decisions every day, all of them without caring to consult us.
That’s why it’s so hard to describe what you see, without causing a minor riot among those less inclined to tolerance and empathy to ‘walk on your shoes,’ at least for a bit, before sending you to the gallows for heresy.
No wonder they called such colors forbidden. Heaven knows a lot of us would feel tempted to actually experiencing them, just out of the sheer pleasure for pursuing the banned and the taboo. But, alas, that’s not always physically possible.

THE BLUE-EYED CAT
Most optical illusions are not illusions at all; they just take the brain for a gullible fool, with its obsessive need to make rational sense out of everything. That’s why even a simple photoshop-enhanced pic, showing for instance, a face with three eyes, plays havoc in our visual perception of what faces should look like.
Which brings us to another kind of self-deception: the one that relates to the supernatural. No, we won’t dwell on the power of religion at this time, to cut them a break. Just your garden-variety need to add a touch of overdone mystery to what escapes the public domain of normality.
We’re talking about, of course, the GOP candidates. Just kidding. But there’s a boy in a poor village in China that has been attracting the 14.30 minutes of the news cycle that he’s due, because of claims other are making about him.
Nong Youhui, despite all reports, is far from being a normal run-of-the-mill boy. In fact, the first striking thing about him has little to do with the supernatural, but certainly is at the root of the global phenomenon his family and village wish to make out of him: he’s a Chinese born with blue eyes.
For many people such a genetic trait, albeit rare, is not impossible, and it can be explained by some solidly old-fashioned facts of life. But nowhere in the stories about him it says that it may be a normal DNA-transmitted gene. Instead, we read that his blue eyes were completely unexplained. Ahem…
SEEING IN THE DARK
But then, on top of it, comes the more heavy-handed ‘mutant’ component of the reports about him: that he can see in the dark, ‘just like a cat.’ And that’s when we start to regret not having considered this whole tale a hoax.
Nong lives in Gwangxi, a mountainous ethnic enclave in China, with a vibrant manual labor industry and sugar cane plantations as their main economic staple. His sudden notoriety will certainly do wonders for his impoverished village, and if anything else, that is a good thing.
Now, to say that anyone can see in the dark, just like a feline, doesn’t really add up. First, because cats, although with eyesight abilities superior to humans, don’t really see in pitch black. And it’s a myth that their eyes emit any light of their own.
The mostly unconfirmed news stories report that tests were conducted with the boy, to attest his ability to see in a light-depleted environment, and that he mastered them all. Of course, as far as we know, such tests haven’t been conducted by anyone affiliated with the few universities listed on the touristic Websites about Gwangxi.
Instead, much of his family and his family’s friends were enlisted to give testimony at to the boy’s ability to read, write and even hunt for crickets in the dark. So, as good buzzkillers as we are, we simply don’t buy it.
We’re sure he’s an outstanding boy, and no one over there is bent into deceiving the also very gullible international media. We just hope they manage to get a water treatment plant or a decent electric grid in the process, but somehow, we doubt that too.
But it’s as nice a fairy tale as any: a special boy, with eyes so blue that he has to squint in the presence of bright light but can, miraculously, see clearly in the dark. It somehow has a brighter glow to it than to just say that he’s a boy with luekodermia.

Just when you were ready to celebrate the fact that summer this year will last a bit longer, and we mean, a very tiny, teeny little bit longer, here comes the buzzkillers to tell you that we’re actually wasting it, meaning, that we’re in fact very late and even close to the end.
These are but just two of the ways that we obsess with measuring time, or at least, fool ourselves with the illusion that time can be measured. But at the end of the day, we’re no better than that Lewis Carroll rabbit, always rushing, insanely busy and ever so late.
And if you thought that such obsession is a mere product of our modern times, hum so over the top and, as that old Lennon song would say, running everywhere at top speed, you haven’t heard the one about the South Pacific.
As it turns out, a tiny, teeny sun-drenched island decided that it had to do some catch up with time of its own, and get in line with the same time zone of nearby Australia, New Zealand and Tonga. The good folks of Samoa did, then, some unheard of in a very long time: they’ve skipped a whole day.
24 HOURS PEOPLE
Samoa paid with a whole Friday, the very last of last year, its entry into the time zone of its bigger neighbors. Something to do with trade partnerships and commerce, we heard. But what do you know? From Thursday straight to Saturday, it was all blue skies and not a drop of rain, so who’s complaining?
We are, that’s who. Imagine we, New Yorkers, wasting so senselessly a whole Friday. What were we supposed to tell folks at home? That we got mugged? The cat stole it? The NYPD seized it? We may know of many a couple who wouldn’t be able to get over that kind of late night talk.
Not the Samoans, apparently. And considering the whole history of our Gregorian calendar, the many times it got tweaked and manipulated and changed and adapted to the mores of the pope in charge or king of Prussia on duty, it’s actually a small miracle we can’t find more excuses to skip a Monday or two too.
YEAR OF THE LEAP
But 2012 is a leap year, someone would say, so there’s already some kind of trend apace, and just like that rabbit, or Oscar Pistorius, the Blade Runner, what difference a small leap in time would make?
That probably would be a good rationale behind the U.S. Naval Observatory‘s decision to skip a second this summer, apparently. But not quite. As we measure time ever more precisely, guess who actually sometimes sags behind? that old home of ours, Earth.
So to adjust the exact passage of time, as measured by atomic clocks, and the natural movement of the planets, which, granted, gave us the idea of counting time in the first place, there’s a need to add a second to the mix. Which very few people will probably notice it, we’re sure.
It may take much more than a minute, and a considerably better writer, to add some detail and color to this business, without confusing everyone.
For all our concerns about time, it was only in 1956 that the International Committee for Weights and Measures made the decision to calculate the exact length of a second based on the year, not by any of the 86,400 contained in a day. That had to do with the mentioned sloppiness of our home planet to keep up with our modern methods of measuring time.
The new calculation determined the length of the second at exactly 1/31,556,925.9747, and the decision was kind of retroactive, arching back to the year of our, er, theirs, er, somebody’s lord of 1900. January, to be precise. Are you still with us? We may ask you questions later.
COUNTING ATOMS
Don’t worry, we’re just about done. The atomic clock as a timekeeping system was adopted in 1972, and it was through it that a certain 0.73 seconds was observed to be lagging, from the slowing rotation of the Earth.
That’s when it became clear that every once in a while a second had to be added, and it’s up to the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service to keep track of that and our own time in synch with the machines and the planets and everything else. Oh, in time, the extra second will be added at the end of June, in case you were wondering and wanted to make preparations, throw a party or something. To be honest, this whole conversation may be a waste of time.
The truth is, we observe nature and then create machines to emulate it, and then we decide that the machines are performing better than nature, then we have to correct nature, and then we lose our ways and have to start it all over again, and so on and so forth.
THE ALARMING CLOCK
Now, for the really bad news, we move on to another concept created in 1947, when it first dawned on human conscientiousness that we had the power to destroy the whole planet in ways that we never had before. And we were, in fact, heading straight to such scenario, if we didn’t change our ways.
We didn’t, actually, but found a system to monitoring them. That’s when the Doomsday Clock was idealized. But wait, that doesn’t mean that there is such a thing as a working clock, automatically representing the many forms we find each day to increase or diminish the risk of exploding the planet.
It’s more like a concept, that takes into account the estimated number of weapons of mass destruction around, their availability, global and local conflicts, and now more than ever, climate change too. Of course the periodic, personal appearance of a mass murderer always makes things a bit more complicated.
But the fact is that, even if things remain exactly as they are now, that conceptual countdown to Armageddon is still on. Some would even say, that’s why the Samoans’ wasteful act of throwing away a brand new Friday is so tragic.
We wouldn’t sweat such small stuff, though. Instead, the idea is to remind everyone that we need to find ways to delay the seemingly inexorable march of invisible hands towards self-annihilation.
IT’S FIVE TO MIDNIGHT
So, in a sober conference earlier this month in Washington, D.C., the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) set the hands of the infamous clock forward one minute from two years ago.
The panel considers a mix of long-term trends and immediate events in the decision-making process. Changing attitudes toward climate change, for example, or a nuclear disaster such as the Fukushima in Japan are some of the factors considered in the decision.
There’s much fear about the nuclear ambitions by Middle Eastern and Asian countries, for example, and we bet that deniers of the damage caused by man-made pollution in the environment also weight heavily when it comes the time to adjust the clock.
But we’ve been in worst shape than now, and in 1949, the clock was set to three minutes to midnight. At the same time, in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and warming of the Russian-U.S. relations, we were at our most optimistic, at seven minutes from the end.
TIME THAT OLD THIEF
That’s right, we were happy and didn’t even know it. That’s why we should be concerned about what exactly we are doing to prevent a doomsday no one would want to happen. But there should also be a certain even-handed attitude about our chances of survival.
We do have an obligation and the duty of leaving a better world for our children than the one we found, no question about it. But we need to also strike the right balance of awareness for action with a proper measure of optimism and hope in the future.
Otherwise we’re again just like that rabbit, always busy, always running, lecturing everyone and preaching on the converted, but painfully ineffective when it comes to do something about it.
Anyone would be surprised by what can be crammed inside a flash, a brief, an ever so eluding piece of time as a precious second. You’d better order some catering.

Hairy and Scary, Spiders May
Still Teach Us a Thing or Two

We’re afraid of them. We wouldn’t be able to fall asleep in a room we knew there’s one lurking somewhere. But we can’t take our eyes out of them.
Which, by the way, is not recommended when it comes to tarantulas. But even the most lethally poisonous spider has much to contribute to our lives, scientists are finding.
For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opens today the world’s largest collection of cloths from silk extracted from spiders.
You probably already knew that this material is superior in strength to regular silk, but did you know how stunningly beautiful it is?
In the meantime, researchers in Singapore have discovered that the same species has developed a clever defensive alkaloid chemical, with which it doses its webs and ward off invading armies of ants.
Want more? What about spider venom to treat erectile dysfunction? That’s what a team of physiologists in Georgia is developing, in hopes to one day offer gentler but equally effective alternatives to Viagra.
The warning about tarantula hairs still stands though, as they can cause serious ocular inflammation. But we consider that, at such proximity with them, we may as well be dead. Moving on.

EMBROIDERED BANANA
The V&A collection used over a million female golden orb-weaver spiders from the highlands of Madagascar, for the exquisitely embroidered and astoundingly light-textured pieces of cloth on display.
Countering such a pomp and ceremony, though, is the fact that the Golden Silk Spider is also known as the Banana Spider or the Giant Wood Spider.
It certainly gives the mystic of such remarkable creatures a certain informality. Not known for being aggressive, they do look imposing. And beautiful too, no two ways about it.
CHEMICAL WARFARE
It’s just a coincidence that another team of international researchers were also observing the same species for a completely different purpose.
What they found out shows that, through evolution, these spiders developed a very effective way of fighting a formidable and feared enemy, ants. They put a chemical on the webs that ants seem to hate.
To keep these other crawlers away from their turf is no small accomplishment, since spiders and even their webs have both high nutritional value for most forest creatures, ants included.
In fact, they’re a fearsome bunch, ever on the move and always in search of prey. But for now, at least, which means, a few million years, the silk masters are left alone to do their thing.

THE SPIDER VIAGRA
The Brazilian Wandering Spider is also a fearsome little critter. A highly venomous spider, its bite can cause excruciating pain and inflammation due to a powerful neurotoxin.
As it progresses, it causes loss of muscle control, affecting breathing and leading to paralysis and eventually asphyxiation. In other words, it’s no bedroom pet.
But, there’s one effect caused by the spider’s bite that may not be so bad, and not for what you may think. Along with everything else, the venom also causes priapism. That’s right, a four-hour, terribly timed erection.
So researchers are hoping to develop an alternative to the current prescription for erectile disfunction, which doesn’t work for everyone. But it may take sometime until a product made from the spider venom reaches the market.
In the meantime, stay away from them. As its name indicates, the species wanders through the forest floor searching for prey, so it’s hard to predict where you’ll come across and be bitten by one.
No need to say that the only thing such detail arouses in us is the hair in the back of our neck.

EYE ON THE HAIRY PET
One of the most interesting things about spiders is the fact that the big, hairy ones are not usually the most dangerous. The many species of tarantulas, for example, can be beautiful, caring mothers and ideal pets.
Two things they are not, though: they don’t make webs and are not poisonous. Or rather, their bite has not much of an effect on humans. But they do have a natural mechanism that reacts when under stress: they shed their hairs.
Whenever in danger, or in the presence of aggressive humans, they burst their back sides in explosions of tiny, highly irritative hairs that can cause serious inflammation in the eyes.
Recent research has also found that the hairs may be behind an increase in chronic panuveitis, an ailment of the ocular globe. And the reason is that they have become popular pets for a certain demographics (not us, we swear).
For all the lore, they’re gentle and beautiful creatures, we must insist. But for those who would much prefer to have them crawling on their face, as pet owners like to do (brrrrr), caution is being advised.
According to the Improbable Research site, a case study even required a delicate surgical procedure called vitrectomy, when the vitreous (transparent gel that fills the eye from the iris to the retina) is removed.

CHOOSING TO RUN
As with the tarantula and its misleading fame, the procedure worked just fine and in six months, the patient was cured. He may have taken steps, though, to prevent his lovely pet from ever crawl upon his face again.
A step that we, of course, would have taken years before even considering having a tarantula as a pet. But that’s just us; we’re skittish that way.

Life Should Be Longer;
Speech Should Be Shorter

If you enjoy reading obscure tech blogs or following fringe Web sites, chances are you know about Dr. NakaMats, a Japanese man who may be the world’s most prolific inventor.
Then again, the most original invention of this very popular man in his country, and virtually unknown anywhere else, may be his own public persona.
Chances are, you may have in your home one of Dr. NakaMats‘ inventions. He’s said to have had a hand on the digital technology that made possible CDs and DVDs, floppy disks, the Casio-type of watches, the taxi meter, and many others.
Not all that successful, which is not uncommon for inventions, and many have been challenged, like the karaoke machine.
Whatever credit he may have, though, what’s surprising is the number of competitors for the title of father of the machine, given the grief it always causes to late night bar patrons.
PHOTOGRAPHING MEALS
But he did win the 2005 Ig Noble Award for photographing every single meal he’d ever had for 34 years, and dutifully monitoring the meals’ effects on his system.
The Ig awards, despite their good humor nature, are dead serious, and have been instrumental in highlighting the value of what it calls ‘improbable research’ for the lives of millions.
His brilliant acceptance speech, the headline of this very post, was as brief, quirky and straight to the point as the awards themselves. He also cleverly managed to avoid Miss Sweetie Poo’s cry out for boredom.
Another one of his concepts, the elusive (and dangerous) ‘Five Seconds Before Death’ time lapse, which supposedly bred many of his ideas, is in general agreement with cutting edge research on the link among creativity, pleasure and levels of oxygen in the brain.
HOLDING HIS BREATH
In order to reach that rarified stage, Dr. NakaMats uses a simple but effective method: he dives and while underwater, he scribbles ideas on a special-designed pad he also invented.
He claims that if such ideas are not captured in the few seconds they last in the brain, they vanish forever. Or he can’t remember them, one or the other.
The fact is that, regardless the way the 83-year old Yoshiro Nakamatsu comes up with his inventions, some of them are really impressive. Like the pedicab powered by water. Or the self-powering light bulbs and heating system of his house.
You may have been almost run over by someone wearing one of his most popular inventions, the sneakers with a spring underneath, devised to improve athlete performance. Others, since there are so many, no one can’t be too sure whether to admire or laugh.
Take his ‘car of the future,’ for example (all these names are our own humble contribution; the originals are in Japanese, anyway). He correctly predicts that in centuries to come, cars will be individual devices and everyone will have their own.
But then he introduces what looks very much like a pair of remote-controlled motorized shoes, and someone may have a hard time not breaking into laughter. Then again, people always laugh at these things. Whatever.

THE LOVE JET SPRAY
The notion that something is not quite kosher reaches the apotheosis stage with what appears to be one of his favorite inventions: the Love Jet. A spray prescribed to be used topically, it became a minor hit in Japan but was greeted with contempt in the U.S.
Dr. NakaMats claims it’s been tested in ’10,000 women,’ a figure repeated everywhere the spray is mentioned but hard to certify. And since he has no medical qualifications to speak of, the scientific community generally won’t give him the time of the day about it.
But his ethical integrity was never an issue, we rush to add, neither relating to this particular invention, nor to any other. And he seems genuinely concerned about the steady decline in the number of births in Japan since the end of World War II.
For someone who ‘plans’ to live until he’s 144 years old, such concern has a very practical component. But perhaps there’s a flaw at the very base of his rationale, as rates of fertility seldom have anything to do with a country’s sexual mores.
OWN WORK IN PROGRESS
It’s Dr. NakaMats’ quirky personality, though, that has the enduring potential of an invention that may last a lifetime or two. His reserved, sober demeanor is sometimes at startling odds with the almost absurd nature of some of his inventions.
Even when conducting a choir of middle age women, who paid top yen to to attend one of his conferences, singing along a poem he wrote about his young school years, it’s as though the joke is on us.
The episode is featured on the Danish filmmaker Kaspar Shroeder’s 2008 documentary on him when he was about to turn 80. It shows an enthralled audience singing about snow storms and the importance of being persistent, specially if you’re are Dr. NakaMats.
AN INVENTED BRAIN
He sometimes glances at the camera as if expecting it to commend his good health habits and intelligent ideas. Since that doesn’t happen, there’s this eery, lingering sense that he’s slightly disappointed with our lack of reverence to his brain.
Despite what you may know about his inventions, some of them may be sitting right next to you as you read this post, Dr. NakaMats remains an enigma, and one gets the impression that we may appear the same way to him, whenever he looks back at us.
It may as well be because it’s hard to consolidate the man who created a non-stop, emissions-free engine, which he says NASA showed interest to one day power a lunar vehicle, with the one who has a very special method to shop for photo cameras, his beloved hobby.
Unlike most people you know, who go by the machine’s technical specs, size, price, maker, Dr. NakaMats has a infallible way to gauge its quality: by smell.
- Camera with bad smell or no smell, bad camera. Camera with good smell, good camera.
As simple as that. He may need to live 144 years to prove to us he’s really human.

Freedom Fighters Catch a Break;
The Internet Is Safe Again for Cats

It was a great, collective effort, the kind of which hadn’t yet been seen before. Most people knew that something should be done about it, but when the conditions were finally right, and it was time to act, there was no hesitation.
In the end, it was a great victory for those of us who believe that it should be our duty to fight the good fight. We’re referring, of course, to the decision by the Israeli legislature last November, to outlaw the declawing of cats.
Now it can be said that it’s once again safe and a birthright to every citizen of the world to enjoy hours of cats frolicking online, without coming across the utterly depressing sight of paws disarmed of their natural, razor-sharp, precision needle feline nails.
Oh, and yes, it was also great to see the Web-restrictive, corporate-sponsored SOPA and PIPA bills being withdrawn from voting by the U.S. Congress this week. That may have been just a clever maneuver, though, to divert the global mobilization that the bills ignited. They can still be reintroduced when we may be all busy watching, well, Internet cats.
SCRATCH YOUR BACK
Of all the little, seemingly inconsequential humiliations we submit our pets, just so we can enjoy their company under our exact terms, declawing is the more damaging. Research has shown that the procedure, called an onychectomy, is utterly painful and may cause lifelong medical complications.
In it, the veterinarian typically removes all or most of the cat’s outer toe joint, bone and all. It’s generally accepted that, its human equivalent would be the amputation of your fingertips at or just above your third knuckle.
Considering that cats also use their toenails to walk upon, and that scratching is an important sight of healthy behavior in felines, observed both in the wild and by domestic, indoor cats, the practice has very few defenders.
They usually sit on the side that much rather have a pristine set of antique furniture, than to have a lively, extremely active and unapologetic possessive pet such as a feline. The question for this folks then is, why bother having them?
In much of Europe, Australia, Turkey, Brazil and many other countries, now including Israel, they most likely won’t have them. Unless they can prove that their pets have a medical condition, it’s a crime to declaw a cat there, punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine of about $20,000.

DON’T TOUCH MY PAWS
In fact, the waning practice albeit still common in parts of the U.S., is already banned in most of California and other states, which is just as well. Once we get the whole country to adopt the ban over here, we should move to other matters of arguable abuse, such as dressing cats as Santas and having them been portrayed as bullies by Hollywood.
Anything. Just don’t touch our Internet cat videos, please. Or our right to access content on line without having to pay big corporations which, at the end of the day, are not really defending the intellectual property of artists and creators, only fatten their bottom line.
They’re the ones who should be declawed.
* Picture: Usyaka, Courtesy of Alexandra Zacharova

For millions of Americans, Friday is not so good anymore: what used to be a time for excitement, the beginning of the weekend, TGIF and all that, now has a dreadful feeling. Another week is over, and it’s almost sure no one will call you back with a job offer today.
In fact, one of the travesties of unemployment is that it inverts things: suddenly, Mondays actually don’t seem so bleak. Neither Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and even Thursdays, although that’s already pushing it. At this point, frankly, who needs any more time off?
You can’t afford not even a lousy Latte, and the prospect of spending any extra time with the now unrestrained frustration of your mate can’t be good for your cholesterol. All you can think about weekends these days is that the better rest of the nation is out, deservedly enjoying the mild winter, while you’re inside, feeling miserable.
So in solidarity, we’ll tell everyone a little of what you and the estimated 16 million jobless in this country have been facing out there. It’s about a bizarre world ruled by sadistic interviewers who strive at tossing one outlandish question after another at you, just to throw you off and keep a pile of resumes they’ve received to a manageable minimum.
There are many categories in the guise of method for this madness. There’s the hypothetical specialist: “Sell me an invisible pen.” (P&G) The sophisticate mathematician: “Twenty-five racehorses, no stopwatch, five tracks. Figure out the top three fastest horses in the fewest number of races.” (Facebook)
The deranged sport-buff: “What is your strategy at table tennis?” (Citigroup). The teasingly insane: “Would you be okay hearing “no” from seven out of 10 customers.” (Enterprise). And the certified psycho: “If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?” (Pottery Barn)
These are actual questions, asked in job interviews and reported to Glassdoor.com, an online job community that encourages people to anonymously share an inside look at companies. Which, honestly, sounds like another exercise in pure mental abnormality, but anyway.
By now, at least 15.5 million of that desolate crowd have heard at least three times over that this kind of question is designed to gauge the candidate’s ability to “think on his feet.” Or to show his “thought process.” Or it may be just because the recruiter is, indeed, deranged.
In fact, another reason for anyone to wish they had already lost their minds is the amount of careers advisers and job counselors and resume specialists, who’re eager to give you pointers that mainly would confirm how far off the track you may be from getting a job anytime soon. And that will be $49.99 a month, thank you very much. Guaranteed to help, heaven help us all.
“If you could describe Hershey, Godiva and Dove chocolate as people, how would you describe them?” (Lubin Lawrence). “How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons etc?” (VWR International). And the now classic, “If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?” (Diageo North America).
Human resources professionals love to have this arsenal to prevent the barbarians (that means you, the job seeker) to penetrate their citadel, of course. It also helps that they usually have no idea what kind of professional you really are, or what means the specifics of your training and expertise, so they’d be lost if had to actually inquire about your qualifications.
It’s also deviously fun to relate the question to the company that is asking it. So Google, the search engine giant that’s trying to pulverize Facebook, couldn’t come up with anything but, “You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?” They are obviously interested in hiring a teacher for the sixth grader kids of their employees, no doubt.
Down at Capital One, they’re asking: “How do you evaluate Subway’s five-foot long sub policy?,” certainly thinking about cutting down the time their staff takes in their lunch breaks. Or Gryphon Scientific, which is trying to hire a professional drinker, with their job question: “How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the U.S.?“
Back at those advisers, who once must have been on your exact same position, and either developed a program they now successfully sell to headhunters, or published a self-help book that pay for their bills, the word is, looking for a job is a full-time job. Subtlety is, obviously, not their forte, but who cares? They surely have what it takes for being hired by HR professionals.
Ready for more? Brown & Brown Insurance is most likely thinking about having you as a client, not as an employee: “How would you rate your life on a scale of 1 to 10?” Merrill Lynch seems to have a lot of time on its hands: “Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.“
And UBS is apparently trying to be ready in case another near-collapse hits its global industry: “If we were playing Russian roulette and had one bullet, I randomly spun the chamber and fired but nothing was fired. Would you rather fire the gun again or respin the chamber and then fire on your turn?“
We’re not going to insult your intelligence, repeating what you probably have heard hundreds of times, about what to do in this or that situation. We won’t even ask you to take our advice and run counterwise, just because we’re convinced that if an interview is not designed to evaluate your professional abilities, then they may be asking something blatantly personal and illegal.
But who are we to argue with these people? They obviously solved their own problems, and that’s why they’re the ones behind a desk, not you, telling you they will call you eventually, when you know damn well they won’t. Then again, we’re also at this side of that desk. But help us god if one day we should stop seeing them for what they really are.
After all, that’s all we got, and we owe to ourselves to tell us, mentally, of course, these people are only as concerned about losing their own jobs as you are about getting one. In the big scheme of things, if they really believe in this garbage, it’s their problem. But you know what they’d say to that, right? Exactly the same thing you suspect they say, the moment you leave the room.
And there’s nothing you can do about that either. As there’s not much you could do today. Wise people use to say that if advice was so good, it’d be charged, not offered you as a gift, but we’ll go ahead and give you one anyway: relax this weekend. Go to a park, lay on the grass, take your kid to the movies on borrowed money.
In other words, do everything we’re trying really hard to do but haven’t been able to yet. You have our blessing. Deep down, we even understand our mate’s murderous feelings towards us. We may not have ourselves in the high echelon of esteem right now either. But we haven’t given up of thinking just yet. That’s all. We’ll be right here, thinking.

* This article was published originally on Colltales July 15, 2011.

Barbie’s New Roles May
Erase Dumb Blonde View

Who knew? Barbie, a doll that inspired years of controversy over its frivolous image (and fashion mishaps) has now reached full revolutionary maturity, at least for the Iranian religious zealots who’ve just banned it.
What’s unexpected, though, is not this latest in a long line of spectacularly ill-timed decisions by the Ayatollahs-ruled regime. It’s the role of Barbie as a global cultural artifact, which is evolving to surprising new heights.
Two recently developments illustrate this trend: A photographer’s series that subverts its usual flimsy image, and an unusually engaged online petition for a new line to be designed for health patients.
UN-ISLAMIC ACTIVITY
Faced with a potential disastrous military threat from Israel, Iran decided to cut to the chase and tackle what it perceives as one of the causes for all ill-intent directed against itself: a domestic-grown cult of Barbie.
The Islamic Republic has been rocked recently by a wave of assassinations of its top scientists and faces stiff international sanctions in response to its nuclear program. Amid such complex pressures, it’s not hard to see why targeting a foreign consumer good is such an easy task.
It’s not clear who controls what in Iran, but it’s possible that President Ahmadinejad, himself facing a constant barrage of demoralizing decisions by the ‘supreme’ Ayatollah leadership, may be behind the ‘morality’ police’s move to enforce the ban.
Perhpas. Barbie may represent, in fact, a disturbing symbol to such a closed society, the same way selling pretty miniature mosques would be at Ground Zero, even in one of the most open cities in the world, New York.
Not that it has to be this way, of course. A doll is, after all, just a toy. Dozens of Muslims died in the Sept. 11 attacks. And killing scientists is possibly one of the worst ways of going about preventing a country from independently developing weapons of mass destruction.

BASED ON A REALITY SHOW
How come Barbie then got thrown in the middle of such a political mess? Well, that itself is something not easy to ask a fanatical who may believe it represents evil. It’d actually be prudent don’t even talk to these people.
At the end of the day, though, the toy that’s the butt of the best dumb and blonde jokes around may have the last, well, cigarette butt to smoke. Take photographer Carrie M. Becker, for example, whose latest series focus on the over-50-year-old toy.
‘Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse’ is a collection of pictures of miniature dioramas about Barbie as if portrayed by a decadent reality show. She’s clearly become a depressing hoarder and we wouldn’t even attempt at speculating on the causes.
It’s enough to admire both the artistry of the detailed, tiny ‘scenes,’ and the cultural implications the show aims at highlighting. It may be a far cry from the plastic, absurdly impersonal, quasi-anorexic original doll.
But within the context of ‘decadent’ secularism that seems to threaten not just the Iranian rulers, but every intolerance-driven religious crusader in the U.S. too, it’s a light-hearted but straight to target political commentary on our own societal mores.

FLESH & BLOOD ACTIVISM
But as it goes, Iran can’t be let off the hook just yet. For a country that’s effectively under siege, it managed to come up with yet another startling misguided decision, one certain to hurt an already reticent international support to its plight: it banned one of its citizens too.
Golshifteh Farahani, an actress who some may even consider a flesh and blood, darker version of Barbie, was just told she’s no longer welcome in her own homeland. Her crime: she challenged the Islamic code of conduct for women by posing nude for a French magazine.
Her unfortunate fate coincides with the Golden Globe awarded to A Separation, a film by Asghar Farhadi, who’s directed Golshifteh in many movies and is nominated for an Oscar this year. The award also prompted a government shut down of Tehran’s House of Cinema Institute.
CANCER PATIENTS MODEL
But perhaps the most surprising role yet that Barbie, the light-headed doll who couldn’t age straight, comes on a Facebook page petition to its maker, Mattel: a bald Barbie.
The movement, launched by two moms, wants Mattel to produce a new line of dolls to inspire cancer patients and other victims of hair loss. It’s certainly right up there, if not topping, some of the doll’s previous roles as ballerina, plastic surgeon and U.S. president.
No word from Mattel yet, but the petition seems to be gaining momentum too: ‘Beautiful and Bald Barbie’ has already gathered more than 120,000 “likes” on the social network site.
Risking going into a tangent here, maybe that would be the best way to beat Iran’s ban on the toy. What about Barbie, the Peace Activist? or Barbie, the Superstar Diplomat? We admit that these ideas may need a lot of work, but still.
Even within the U.S., wouldn’t it be an interesting development if there would be a line of Barbie, the Iraq-Vet Presidential Candidate? Or Barbie, the Occupy Wall Street Activist? Would it be that our own ‘ayatollahs’ would rush to try to ban them too? Who knows?

Your Wide Behind May
Weight on Commuting

Planes, trains and automobiles. Subways and ferry boats. Pretty much all forms of transportation these days are going through a gradual but inexorable change: all are widening their seats to accommodate our enlarging girths.
In other words, either transit authorities accept our outsized behinds or they’ll be the ones to be kicked in you-know-where. It’s a costly change, to be sure. But there’s something else, besides concerns about bottom line costs, or comfort, at play: safety.
It’s a bit ironic then that some of New York City subway trains are manufactured by Kawasaki, a Japanese company. And that it comes from there too the latest innovation in car seats: the butt-recognition system.
THE JAPANESE EXCEPTION
It’s ironic for two factors. As the U.S. population, as most industrialized nations, is getting alarmingly fatter, Japan has the lowest obesity rate in the developed world: 3%, compared to the whooping 32% for Americans.
The other factor is that in the 1980s, another Japanese company, Hino Motors, got a contract to build NYC buses and failed miserably. The reason: the seats were too tight. Something you can still see it happening on the Kawasaki R-62 model train, used on the No. 3 line.
One would think, thus, that concerns about overweight commuters wouldn’t have much traction with Japanese transport researchers. But one would be wrong, of course, as Tokyo is, after all, the world’s most populous city.
For that’s exactly what’s behind the Advanced Institute for Industrial Technology’s new car seat. It can automatically identify the person who is sitting on it, and remember what it feels like to be sat on by various people.
As a butt-recognition system, the seat may serve to other purposes. It can track and serve as an early warning device to your weight gain or loss, for example. And more; if such gain is too extreme, it could, in theory, refuse to turn on your car.

THESE SEATS ARE TAKEN
In the U.S., the debate over obesity is way overheated and tends to involve everything but your grandma’s recipe for corn muffins. Public health, certainly, personal freedom, most likely, prejudice, very often; feel free to jump in and add your own spice to the mix.
What’s not usually associated with it is public safety, though. But it is a concern, specially to determining crash-test standards for trains and buses, and for operators of commuter ferries.
The Coast Guard, which issues guidelines for passenger vessels, has revised in December its Assumed Average Weight per Person rules, to adapt to Americans’ growing girths. It added 25 pounds to the 1960s average, to 185 pounds per person.
Again, safety, not comfort, is the main goal here. And, for ferry operators, the possible impact of the changes on their bottom lines, as they’ll need to reduce the number of seats to accommodate larger commuters.
Companies all over the U.S. may be affected, from Seattle to Georgia to New York, but many almost never operate at full capacity. Leisure boats, such as the World Yacht and the Circle Line in Manhattan, for example, already operate on purpose at about 50 percent of capacity.

WANT FRIES WITH THAT?
Calculating how much Americans weight is not an exact science, but it does require scientific research. The Cost Guard used the Center for Disease Control’s average male weight, 194.7 pounds, and female, 164.7 pounds, then added a few pounds for clothing and personal items.
Boat operators don’t have to weigh passengers but a miscalculation can be obviously fatal. A group of 100 schoolchildren may not be hard to fit under a boat’s overall capacity. One hundred members of the Giants delegation, on the other hand, would be a completely different matter.
But as we said, the issue of rising obesity is loaded with a lot of extras, making it difficult to have a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Something could be said, though, about the increased amount of public resources used to deal with, without actually tackling, the problem.
Local governments and private companies go out of their way to handle the growing demand for larger seats, sturdier toilet bowls, roomier walkaways and even bigger extra-large clothing.

ROCKING THE WEIGHTY BOAT
But it’s when it comes to eating habits that the issue causes heartburns, as eateries serve each time larger portions, while more people obsess about their weight by developing eating disorders and psychological traumas.
There’s very little argument as to whether it’s a matter of public health. But most attempts at establishing an educated discussion about personal choices capsize under the er weighty concerns over the role of government in regulating private lives.
Besides, for slender commuters, it can’t hurt having a few inches more to spread their tired bones after working in tight cubicles, and on their way to even slimmer quarters. And one can’t help but be thankful that there’s such a thing as a legal average limit per commuter.
Hardly a month goes by without another overcrowded commuter train or ferry crashing or capsizing in an impoverish country. Even when the accident has less to do with lack of resources than with official corruption or simple negligence.
In any case, excess weight, not weighty commuters, may have been one of the causes of the worst tragedy in the New York harbor, the sinking of the PS General Slocum, which caught fire in June of 1904 and killed over one thousand German-Americans.
We owe to those members of the St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, who were on their way to a church picnic, a lot of the present rules governing the New York waterways, including, as you may’ve guessed, how much weight each boat is supposed to safely carry.
It may take much more than the hundred-year old sinking of the Titanic, though, to make people finally exercise some restrain and tell the server: I’ll have the salad.

They May Still Steal Bikes,
But Let Us Pay for Your Coffee

Sometimes, it’s better not to know. Patrick Symmes, who had his bicycle stolen in Midtown, embarked in a cross-country odyssey to recover it. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter, for he never saw the bike again. He does though have the tape of the theft, which he watches over and over again.
Then, as if to prevent you for feeling too sorry about it, there’s this anonymous woman, who walked into a coffee shop and left a large bill, to pay for everybody’s drinks. The idea caught on, other people followed suit, and they can’t stop talking about how nice we can be to each other.
Before we go anywhere with these two examples, let’s get something straight: don’t expect us to tell you whether there’s a lesson to be learned about all that. We’re funny that way.
If you live in the city, chances are you already had at least one bike stolen from you. On the same token, a stranger may have paid for your refill once, so we’re not completely sold on this supposedly balancing payback of life.
Stuff happens, you may be on either end of the short stick, and all you can do is to move on. To read too much into things is almost always a recipe to disaster. Moving on.
I WANT MY BIKE BACK
For such a relatively cheap means of transportation, the number of bicycles stolen every year in the U.S. is staggering. FBI statistics claim that 204,000 of them were stolen nationwide in 2010, but those are only the documented thefts.
In New York, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and other bike-loving cities, this number may be much higher. And so are casualties too, mostly due to lack of appropriate education from drivers and also by imprudence by riders, but that’s another story.
To many people, it’s not the dollar value of their wheels what hurts them the most; it’s the disappointment of having something illicitly taken away from you. Usually in broad daylight.
And the thing is, who ever sees people carrying the Jaws of Life around, since they’re are the lock-breaking device of choice of many a bike thief?
In a big city, having your transportation taken away may also hinder your ability to make a living, at least until you replace it. Messengers, delivery guys, even, why not? athletes, who often rely on biking to keep in shape for their busy competitive schedules.
Also, by the way the economy is going, it’s beginning to look a lot like in the Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 classic masterpiece “Bicycle Thieves,” with its heartbroken dad and son walking the streets searching for their stolen bike.
JOURNEY TO THE UNDERWORLD
Symmes, as a bona fide New Yorker, never gave up and wound up uncovering some fascinating facts about the underground world of illegal bike trafficking (yes, apparently, there are many such networks).
From interviews with obviously busier-than-thou police detectives to discouragement from prescincts to report stolen bykes (lest not weight on the clean record of crime fighting with such a mundane occurrence) to his own independent research, he learned a thing or two about this lucrative business.
He came across, for example, the case of Igor Kenk, a bike-shop owner, who had 2,865 stolen bikes squirreled away. The most interesting thing about this ‘Slovenian intellectual,’ though, was the fact that he’d links with the classical music scene.
His odyssey through the back alleys of America took him to a number of cities, several GPS tracking devices, which all performed poorly, various scrappy, ultimately failed plans to catch a bicycle thief in the act, and the purchasing of six bikes, some stolen right away and some slowly depleted of their parts until there was nothing left.
It certainly makes it for an entertaining read. But he never came across the original bike stolen during lunch hour, or found out who actually took it.
But he has the DVD of the two thieves, which he watches over and over again. It’s poignant and he did get much more than a bike ride out of the experience.

ANONYMOUS (COFFEE) DONOR
You may think that a lot of times what this world needs now is love, er, generosity and acts of random selflessness. But sometimes they’re already happening all around you and if you fail to notice them, well, the problem is your prescription glasses, perhaps, but not the unknown kind hearts.
The coffee shop in Savannah, Georgia, is our stand in today for such nice gestures you were told happen all the time, but you never actually saw them happening.
And the nicest thing is not only that the woman, who chose to remain anonymous, keeps coming back to leave another large bill to her fellow customers. It’s the customers themselves, who took the hint and now do the same for others.
There’s no two ways of being cynical about this. If it’s no longer spontaneous, it’s still a unrequested act towards someone else’s day. Again, with this economy, how many times you’ve skipped stopping at the local Starbucks because, well, you simply didn’t have any cash?
Alright, so you may say, why not food? or shelter? or some nice volunteering at the local homeless shelter for this woman, right? Isn’t that interesting how eager we all are to suggest even better things for SOMEONE ELSE to do?
WE THOUGHT ABOUT THAT TOO
The comedian Louis C.K. talks about this ‘almost’ gesture of kindness we sometimes ‘almost’ perform, and how often, we even congratulate ourselves afterwards for having thought about it. Never mind actually doing something about it.
So let those nice folks of Savannah bask in the light of their community, knowing that there’s at least one, certified, act of niceness going around. We can’t take that away from them.
Just don’t go asking them if they’ve happened to see a bike you’d just hooked up right in front of the coffee shop, and it’s no longer there. Then, if you remember the Soup Nazi character from the series of that other comedian, Seinfeld, it’d be the case to say:
- No coffee for you.