Being on the rag again, I decided to sacrifice a pad to science and find out whether, in fact, you do only lose 8 dainty tablespoons of blood.

Pad used: Whisper Wings regular.
# of above already overflowed this month: 3

I coloured some water with grape juice and used a dessert spoon, since I don’t have a tablespoon. There are 1.25 dessert spoons to the tablespoon. The pad absorbed 10 dessert spoons before it overflowed. That’s 8 tablespoons.

So, if the 8 tbsp estimate were correct, the average woman could get through the average period on one average pad.

HA…HAHAH…HAHAHAHA… HAHA…HA… (insert infinite loop here)

Back home, I didn’t have this problem because I used tampons all the time, even at night. But the choice of tampons here is very limited, and the ones available tend to fluff, which seems unhygienic. I also worry about using them for hours on end in the tropics, since it’s easier to catch infections in the heat and humidity here, so I’m too chicken to use them at night. As for overnight pads, they feel like fucking diapers — I don’t see why any grown woman should have to wear such a thing.

Thais apparently use menstrual cups, which are rubber containers you shove up there, and…yeah. I think I’d need Lolrus’s bukkit.

On the upside, I hardly had any downswings in mood this month. But I was busy just before my period, there was the good news of finding the new flat, and I ate chocolate, so all of that might have contributed.

Anyway, I can has Nobel prize for biology now?

…when God sat on a mountain in India puffing on the rolled leaves of that spindly plant He had made back on Day Three, He looked around and thought, “Oh, Me, wouldn’t some mind-controlling fungus and worms be, like, total win?”

This deer with a genetic defect causing it to grow a single, centrally placed horn is alive and well and living in Italy.

Male crayfish engage in ritualised fights that go through three phases, only in the last, and rarely reached, of which do they attempt to cause each other real harm. To study the effect of spectatorship on other males, researchers at Bowling Green State University set up fights with one crayfish watching. However, afterwards, far from being sharpened up for the old ultraviolence, they didn’t fight as well as crayfish who hadn’t watched a fight. The biologists-turned-Don Kings speculated that this may be because they (the crayfish, that is) pee themselves whilst viewing the combat and thus waste their fightin’ chemicals, or possibly just get confused. Moreover, a study on Australian yabby crayfish has shown that males seem to remember each other’s faces, preferring to fight opponents they’ve taken on before, presumably because they know more about them (which suggests an even greater capacity to remember stuff) - or maybe crayfish are just the kind to hold grudges. In any case, crayfish now have to go on my list of things I’ll think twice about before eating.

In other news, my poem “The Crone Meets Her Son (on a battlefield)”, published in Electric Velocipede #13, has been nominated for a Rhysling Award (short poem). Which is very unexpected, and very nice.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/16/healthscience/15brain.php?page=1 

But nobody knows whether dark energy — if it dies — will die soon enough to save the universe from a surplus of Boltzmann brains. In 2006, Dr. Page calculated that the dark energy would have to decay in about 20 billion years in order to prevent it from being overrun by Boltzmann brains.

Hopefully the random permutations of matter in the multiverse will create Jerry Cornelius, some time before those 20 billion years are up, to save us from chaos.

Theoretical physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi has come up with a unified theory of the universe that takes into account the strong force, which binds quarks in atomic nuclei, the weak force, which controls radioactive decay, electromagnetic force and, last but not least, gravity, which has so far only been included in the string theory model. Lisi thinks the universe is the shape of the E8 pattern, which I recall seeing hanging on the wall in our kindergarten circa 1975.

Kabbalists will note that E8 has 248 points, which is the number of positive commandments in the Torah. It is also the number of Indian tailor shops between Sukhumvit sois 3 and 13, and the number of times I check my reflection each day to see if I’m getting fat.

I had fun with this one. The animal Mavis is morphing into is of course the female deep sea angler fish.

While looking for a page on deep sea anglers I found this interesting blog on science and the arts. Scroll down to see zebroids, a very cute tiger-rabbit (a relative of the Vorpal Bunny of the Cave of Caerbannog, perhaps), a deep sea angler and her harem, and a mantis that camouflages itself as an orchid–I can’t resist saying, a truly orchidaceous creature.

Of the above, only the tiger-rabbit is not real–or not yet. Perhaps this DIY DNA development kit is only the start of things to come. I hope so since, with the rate at which species are vanishing, it would be a very fine thing if we could learn how to make them again or at least construct suitable replacements to fill empty ecological niches. We might even learn to make tougher models that are more resistant to changes in climate.

I guess I’m an odd sort of environmentalist. I don’t see the ideal destiny of the human race on earth as one of simply living in harmony with nature. I see it rather as the acquiring of comprehensive understanding and true mastery over organisms, ecosystems, climates (i.e. weather control technology), in order to be able stewards of the planet.

Another cool thing in biology–growing replacement organs from your own cells, using, amongst other technology, a modified ink jet printer. Apparently this has been going on for eight years. Was I the only one who didn’t know?

Ann Smith transforms scrap parts from discarded machines into robotic animal sculptures:

http://www.wired.com/culture/art/magazine/15-11/pl_arts_bots http://www.burrowburrow.com/(check out the 2D art too - the “aircow” is just too cute)

Edouard Martinet’s very nice junk metal sculptures. I love the bulbous frogs.

The walls have mouths - Hylozoic Soil, a creation of Canadian architect and artist Philip Beesley, is a building material that, well, eats you. Yet looks rather attractive, so that you really want to touch it…

Brian Geig’s lovely orreries and related models such as astrolabes and armillary spheres. I’m a mechanical dunce but still susceptible to enchantment by gleaming clockwork - and an orrery is such a romantic instrument/toy.

From Wired.com -

Scientists at Harvard and MIT have genetically modified mouse neurons, introducing fluorescent proteins from jellyfish that spread along neural pathways as the mouse thinks, painting a picture of brain activity, which turns out to look quite beautiful. This Reuters article gives a more detailed explanation of the technique, which its inventors hope will have medical applications.

More cool stuff:

A levitating lamp, by Dutch designer Angela Jansen of Crealev. The company also makes a floating Buddha and a floating airplane, and does custom work. For some reason, the first desire that pops into my mind when I think about what I’d like is a floating head of John the Baptist on/above a plate.

The art of Tabitha Vevers. Not all the links work, but check out the Shell Series, which, with its amorous lobster, has shades of Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. And there’s a narwhal - yay!

While I was looking up “cul-de-lampe” the other day I came across the interesting corbels at the church of Kilpeck in Herefordshire. I think I must have been there when I was a kid, since the dog and hare corbel, startlingly like a modern cartoon image, looks familiar. But I don’t remember my parents showing me the Sheela-na-gig…

Egyptian motifs ended up in medieval Europe via the Moors in Spain, leading to eclectic imagery like this cross in Monasterboice, Ireland.