Smell receptor

Coloured transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of a section through the olfactory (smell) epithelium of the nose. At centre (orange) is an olfactory receptor cell body. At its top two long, modified non-motile cilia project into the liquid lining of the nasal cavity. The cilia are thought to be the sites of interaction between odiferous substances and the receptor cells. Surrounding the receptor cell are the supporting cells with surface microvilli (finger-like). Within the cells, mitochondria (purple) & endoplasmic reticulum (flattened sacs) are seen.

Image from the SciencePhoto Library, via Fresh Photons.

"Um Yah Yah" - the history of the St. Olaf "rouser"

The fight song for St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minnesota) can be heard on several YouTube clips (including at the 2:00 mark here with 15 pianos), but its most curious aspect is in its refrain: "Um! Yah! Yah!, Um! Yah! Yah! Um! Yah! Yah!, Um! Yah! Yah! Um! Yah! Yah!, Um! Yah! Yah! Um! Yah! Yah! Yah!.

There are two stories about the history of those words - a legendary one, and a true one. The legendary background was explained in a 2005 issue of St. Olaf Magazine (via MPR News):

The rouser [is] based upon the old St. Olaf Faculty Hymn, which legend has it was sung at the beginning of all faculty meetings... Hagbarth Hardangerson ’29, who knew many of the great men named in the Faculty Hymn (“They were my teachers”), claimed the faculty never sang anything at their meetings... “most of the faculty couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, and they never tried singing again.”

When you read the refrain(s), which apparently neither the faculty nor anyone else could commit to memory, you will immediately understand why the original words were replaced by the easier-to-remember, albeit somewhat ridiculous, nonsense phrase “um yah yah.”

We teach at St. Olaf,
We don’t dance or chew snuff,
Our students are Halvor and Gudrun and Thor;
They study like furious,
Their minds are so curious;
We sure are a bunch of Norwegians galore.

Gulbrandson, Narveson, Huggenvik, Ellingson,
Amundson, Klaragard, Halvorson, Roe.
Fredrickson, Rasmussen, Tollefsrud, Peterson,
Skogerboe, Faillettaz, Jorgenson, Boe.

We teach at St. Olaf,
It’s built on a big bluff,
The wind blows so hard that it causes distress.
But colleagues are glorious
And students uproarious
There’s no place on earth that we’d rather profess.

Christensen, Sheveland, Gustafson, Maakestad,
Lokensgaard, Skurdalsvold, Wrigglesworth, Ross.
Rovelstad, Jacobson, Lutterman, Otterness,
Erickson, Gunderson, Iverson, Foss.

Thormodsgard, Bieberdorf, Overby, Gimmestad,
Kittelsby, Ytterboe, Hinderlie, Njus.
Ditmanson, Odegaard, Hilleboe, Anderson,
Anderson, Anderson, Anderson, Muus! 

That hymn supposedly morphed into the modern version:

We come from St. Olaf,
We sure are the real stuff.
Our team is the cream of the colleges great.
We fight fast and furious,
Our team is injurious.
Tonight Carleton College will sure meet its fate.

Um! Yah! Yah!, Um! Yah! Yah!
Um! Yah! Yah!, Um! Yah! Yah!
Um! Yah! Yah!, Um! Yah! Yah!
Um! Yah! Yah! Yah!

That's the legend.  Here's the less humorous but more believable true story:

In 1987, Hagbarth Bue, member of the class of 1911, was interviewed on how the fight song originated (incidentally, the audiocassette is available in the St. Olaf College Archives). Mr. Bue said the 1911 class octet was practicing a Norwegian folk song, "Jeg Har Ute Pulten," which was to be sung at half time of a basketball game. The song was taught to two audiences separated by a basketball court. Because of a shortage of time, they simply substituted Um! Yah! Yah! for the words of the chorus.

The first published account of Um! Yah! Yah! appears in the 1913-14-15 triannual Viking under the song title "Jeg Har Ute Pulten" (embed at right).

A hat tip to Mr. Jeff Sauve, Associate College Archivist at St. Olaf, for providing this information and the image of the original publication; he notes that the basketball Goat Trophy celebrated its centennial this winter too.

Schoolteacher's homestead

Schoolteacher Miss Mary Longfellow holding down a claim west of Broken Bow, Nebraska.

An article in a recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine provided an overview of the Homestead Act, which gave land free to those who would live on it:

The Homestead Act, signed by Lincoln on May 20, 1862, embodied a radical promise: free land for the masses. Until then the federal government had generally sold its unoccupied property, favoring men with capital. As a result, by the 1840s big farms were consuming smaller ones, and efforts to change the system were gridlocked as Congressional debate over slavery intensified. The problem became so pressing that Representative Galusha Grow, a Pennsylvania Republican, warned in 1860 that the nation was courting “a system of land monopoly—one of the direst, deadliest curses that ever paralyzed the energies of a nation or palsied the arm of industry.”

From the moment the first homesteader, Daniel Freeman, stepped foot into his local land office in 1863 to apply for 160 acres in Beatrice, Nebraska, to the day in 1979 when the last homesteader, Ken Deardorff, of Alaska, filed for a title to his 50-acre claim, four million settlers—men and women, former slaves and new immigrants—attempted it. About 1.6 million succeeded, homesteading a combined total of 270 million acres, or 10 percent of the country.

Further details at Smithsonian.   Photo credit Solomon Butcher, via Cool Chicks From History, with these additional comments from NebraskaStudies.Org:

The Homestead Act of 1862 stated that any person age twenty-one and head of a family could claim land. The Act also contained the provision that widows of Union soldiers could deduct the time of service their husbands spent in the Civil War from the five-year residency requirement. So, while the phrase "head of a family" did place limitations on which women could file, many women took advantage of the Homestead Act and other laws to file claims in their own names.

Mnemonic memory system

I'm posting this because it is the system I learned in the 1960s for memorizing lists of words.  I lost the book in the 1970s, but still knew the system and for a party trick could memorize lists of 50 words or so.  Just this week I found the name for the system - "Major System (also called the phonetic number system, phonetic mnemonic system, or Herigone's mnemonic system)" and was able to look up some information about it in Wikipedia.

The process involves substituting consonants for numbers and thereby creating words.  The first 25 key words are as follows: 1 tea,  2 Noah,  3 May,  4 ray,  5 law,  6 Shaw, (author)  7 key,  8 fee,  9 bay,  10 tease,  11 tot,  12 tan,  13 team,  14 tar,  15 tale,  16 touch,  17 tack,  18 taffy,  19 tap,  20 niece,  21 net,  22 noon, 23 name,  24 Nero,  25 nail...

The full list of words and the details of the system are available at Good Memory Secrets (linkrot), but I don't think that's the original source.

Posted because if I forget the words, I now can go to my blog and look them up.

:.)

"Bridalplasty" is NOT a joke by the Onion

YouTube link. 

I thought this video was a comedy sketch or parody when I first started watching it.  Had to stop and check -  it actually was an American "reality" television show.

The show followed 12 engaged women competing for the wedding of their dreams and their dream plastic surgery procedure. Each woman had a plastic surgery wishlist, and the winner of each week's wedding-themed challenge would win one plastic surgery procedure from her list.

Knowing that, I just couldn't keep watching the clip. 

Barry Goldwater, old-school conservative Republican

I remember not liking him when he ran for President in 1964 but the prediction above is interesting, as is this comment from the Reddit thread:

Jewish father, Protestant mother, he hated the mixing of religion and politics. He was totally different than the Republicans of today. From Wikipedia: "In response to Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell's opposition to the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, of which Falwell had said, "Every good Christian should be concerned", Goldwater retorted: "Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass." (According to John Dean, Goldwater actually suggested that good Christians ought to kick Falwell in the "nuts", but the news media "changed the anatomical reference.")

Goldwater also had harsh words for his one-time political protege, President Reagan, particularly after the Iran-Contra Affair became public in 1986. Journalist Robert MacNeil, a friend of Goldwater's from the 1964 Presidential campaign, recalled interviewing him in his office shortly afterward. "He was sitting in his office with his hands on his cane ... and he said to me, 'Well, aren't you going to ask me about the Iran arms sales?' It had just been announced that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran. And I said, 'Well, if I asked you, what would you say?' He said, 'I'd say it's the god-damned stupidest foreign policy blunder this country's ever made!'"."

Some of Goldwater's statements in the 1990s aggravated many social conservatives. He endorsed Democrat Karan English in an Arizona congressional race, urged Republicans to lay off Bill Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and criticized the military's ban on homosexuals: "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar." He also said, "You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."

A few years before his death he went so far as to address establishment Republicans by saying, "Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you've hurt the Republican party much more than the Democrats have." In 1996, he told Bob Dole, whose own presidential campaign received lukewarm support from conservative Republicans: "We're the new liberals of the Republican party. Can you imagine that?" In that same year, with Senator Dennis DeConcini, Goldwater endorsed an Arizona initiative to legalize medical marijuana against the countervailing opinion of social conservatives."

Basket-woven hair

I'm not sure if I'm using the proper term.  A quick search revealed modern examples here, here, and here, with results looking like this -

- which I personally don't find particularly attractive (but they may be catwalk-type creations not intended for real life).  The modern ones also incorporate extensions:

Palau divided models’ hair into three sections before adding extensions over and under natural strands for a woven effect, ending each panel in a skinny braid. Back panels were folded flat against the head and pinned in place before the entire head was sprayed with Redken’s Forceful 23 hair spray. Sixty bottles of hairspray were used to hold everything in place!

By contrast, the embedded image at top (via Alabaster) dates from 1933 looks like it probably was created using the woman's own hair.

Regarding immigration policies

An interesting observation from an editorial in Forbes magazine last year:

A new report from the Partnership for a New American Economy found more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Eighteen percent (or 90) of the 500 companies had immigrant founders. The children of immigrants started another 114 companies. (A copy of the report can be found here.)

One reason these figures are remarkable is that, according to the report, the foreign-born population of the United States has averaged 10.5 percent since 1850...

The report also notes, "Many of America’s greatest brands – Apple, Google, AT&T Budweiser, Colgate, eBay, General Electric, IBM, and McDonalds to name just a few – owe their origin to a founder who was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.”

The list accompanying the research carries some surprising information, Steve Jobs, the famous co-founder of Apple, is a child of an immigrant parent from Syria. Walt Disney also was the child of an immigrant (from Canada), as well as the founders of Oracle (Russia and Iran). IBM (Germany), Clorox (Ireland), Boeing (Germany) 3M (Canada) and Home Depot (Russia).

Via a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little more of...

Creepy perfume advertisement (1983)

For those who think the inappropriate sexualization of children in advertisements is a recent phenomenon, note these photos by Francesco Scavullo were published in Harper's Bazaar almost thirty years ago.

Via Sighs and Whispers, where there are two additional images.

An abacus seller (1860s)

Minimally cropped from an 1860s photo by William Carrick, in the collection National Galleries of Scotland.

As in other European capitals, portrait photography in St Petersburg was a fiercely competitive business; more difficult still for the absence of a large Russian middle class, a comparative lack of sunlight and the high cost of materials. To boost the income of his St Petersburg studio, Carrick conceived of the idea of a series of 'Russian types', produced for the tourist market in the form of small cartes de visite. These photographs, largely of street vendors, helped satisfy the curiosity of the public about the character of Russia's itinerant peasants.

Via First Time User.

Fires and forest density

Observations from an article in The Economist:

The wildfire raging in New Mexico’s historic Gila National Forest has already scorched some 230,000 acres (93,000 hectares) of woodland, making it the biggest in the state’s history... In many ways, the New Mexico blaze is a test case. It represents the first large-scale opportunity that firefighters have had to test a new approach to forest management. This relies on pruning the undergrowth and thinning out the stands, and then letting nature take its course when lightning strikes and triggers a blaze...

Actually, there is nothing new about the latest approach to forest management. Native Americans were practising similar forms of forestry long before settlers arrived from Europe. Where lightning had not done the job for them, they set fires to thin the forests—so grasslands and edible plants could flourish between the trees and attract grazing animals for hunting. Records indicate the land in pre-settlement times had no more than a dozen trees per acre. Today’s forests, whether natural or man-made, tend to be packed with well over 100 trees per acre...

There's more at the link, especially re the influence of forest density on water management.

Yesterday, I hiked three miles along a bicycle path in the Madison area; while doing so, I passed through some acreage that was being restored to "oak savannah" conditions by grubbing out the underbrush.  The contrast was striking.  For the previous half-mile the woods on either side of the bike path were so dense that one couldn't see any further than the line of first trees.  Where the restoration was underway, one could see for hundreds of yards.  This was being done in a suburban setting where wildfire would be impractical as a clearance mechanism; the community was relying on "elbow grease" and some funding from the sale of turkey hunting licenses. 

Magma cum laude

YouTube link. 

A scientist is determined to get some totally fresh molten lava from the lake in Nyiragongo volcano, "which has some of the fastest-moving lava flows ever recorded."

Via BoingBoing.

Practical use of the transit of Venus

I didn't watch the event this past week - I'll plan to catch it next time in 2117.  The best summary I've seen of the scientific importance of the phenomenon is at Brain Pickings, which explains that in the past the transit of Venus was used to measure the size of the solar system:

In 1716, sixty-year old Sir Edmund Halley called on astronomers all over the world to leave their cozy observatories, travel to the edges of the known world, set up their telescopes, and turn their eyes toward the sunrise on the morning of June 6th, 1761, when the first Transit of Venus of the scientific age would march across the face of the sun.

In the eighteenth century, the solar system had a shape but not a size. By timing the entrance and the exit of Venus across the sun from latitudes all over the world, Halley explained, astronomers could roughly calculate the distance between the Earth and the Sun— a “celestial yardstick” for measuring the universe, as Andrea Wulf calls it in her excellent book Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens...

Months before the 1761 transit, a fleet of international astronomers was dispatched to South Africa, India, Siberia, Mauritius, eastern Finland, Newfoundland, and the remote island of St. Helena with instructions to set up their massive telescopes in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth...

Eight years later, in 1769...[o]ver four hundred viewings were scheduled, including locations in Lapland and Baja California. The brightest minds of the Enlightenment rallied around the cause: Benjamin Franklin spearheaded the calculations in the colonies, and Captain James Cook shuttled a fleet of scientists and naturalists to Tahiti, where they viewed the transit with cloudless blue skies.  

Cook's diagram is the top embed.  More info at Brain Pickings, via BoingBoing.

Human sperm cannot smell Lilies-of-the-Valley

As part of an investigation of how sperm find their way to ova, the following was reported in the Max Planck Gesellschaft:

In their current study, the Bonn researchers demonstrate, in cooperation with scientists from the Forschungszentrum Jülich, that the Lily of the Valley scent imitates the effect of progesterone on sperm: Bourgeonal opens the CatSper channels directly -- that is without deviation via olfactory receptors and complex biochemical signalling pathways as found in olfactory cells. However, the scents only work at concentrations over 1000 times higher than progesterone. Therefore, scents only work if overdosed. The "Lily of the Valley phenomenon" is a laboratory artefact: sperm do not have an olfactory signalling pathway.

Via Science Daily.

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Via High Fiving a Million Angels and Titam et le Sirop d'Erable.