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Dogs' sense of smell?

PROEMIUM:

If you have a weak stomach or just don't like "gross stuff," don't read this inscitia. Honestly, writing about it is a pretty unpleasant task for me, but I feel obliged to "air it out" (!) here, if anywhere. Scientia inscitiam vincere debet!

INSICITIA:

Why do dogs not find human farts unpleasant? Similarly, why do they not mind sniffing the toilet and other animals' urine and feces (in some cases even licking them!)? Do dogs think anything smells bad?

COGITATIO:

These phenomena truly baffle me. I can't possibly believe humans' sense of smell is better than most dogs'. I'm also not willing to say humans' unhappy reactions to farts are purely socialized (whereas pain tolerance is largely conditioned).

My first hunch is that somehow humans tap more directly into a certain section of the so-called olfactory spectrum. I imagine dogs react just as unfavorably as we do to the smell of rotting flesh, but perhaps that is because "the maggot smell" belongs in a more biologically universal section of the olfactory spectrum. We can smell the stink of farts more sensitively than they can; note, indeed, that while we find dog farts stinky, they don't find their own or our farts stinky.

A second hunch is that, paradoxically, because dogs' sense of smell is so much keener, they can smell 'beneath' the stink and try to get a sense of what produced the fart (i.e., they are smelling the remnants of our food). Sort of like how we hone in on the scent of raisins as we at mediocre raisin bread. We can smell both, but we attune our nose to one smell in preference to another. In the case of farts, however, our olfactory powers are too feeble to break through the obvious outer fart-layer to access the remnant food smells.

RESPONSUM:

…

Tres inscitiae…

(Or is it "tria inscitiae"? Such ignorance right out of the gates!)

QUAESTIONE PRIMA: What are "wild hairs"?

COGITATIO: I think they are a kind of 'hair cancer' in which one hair radically but terminally metastasizes as a kind of very limited mitotic error. They are 'deformed' like other tumors, but in a hair-like way, which is what makes them so thin and easily removed.

RESPONSUM:

QUAESTIONE SECUNDA: Can and do dogs really smell fear?

COGITATIO: I think they cannot 'smell' it as much as simply 'sense' it in broader instinctive, phenomenological way. If, however, they really can smell fear, I'm all for isolating that "fearomone" and using it in covert mass-public psyops! Woot!

RESPONSUM:

QUAESTIONE TERTIA: How or why does the gas gauge drop to empty in some cars/motorcycles when you shut off the engine?

COGITATIO: I suspect the battery, when turned on, engages some small valve or hose-head which relies on passive pressure (gravity) to shift the gas into the gas gauge floating in the tank.

RESPONSUM:

Formal ands?

I finished Mortimer Taube's Computers and Common Sense and a passing reference of his to the ability of computers to handle formal operations got me thinking…

INSCITIA:

Is 'and' definable in formal logic? More generally, are any of the basic logical operations definable in formal logic? 'And' is symbolized with a floating dot, namely, •. "I am tall and I am short" is symbolized as "p • q". "I am short" can be symbolized as M ∃ P(x), where M ∃ means "there is a man" and P(x) means "it is true that x is tall". "I am not short" would be ¬M ∃ P(x), etc ("there is no man such that…).

But can we state 'and' in formal notation? And has a meaning, so can't it be stated as a sort of proposition? Would it be • ≡ • ∀ P(x) ∪ x ∍ (p ∨ q ∌ ¬p ∨ ¬q)?

I am way too weak in formal logic to crack this right now. But in normal English I am inclined to say "'and' is materially equivalent to all cases where x is a member of the set that contains [the attributes or propositions] p, q, no negation of p, and no negation of q (as well as any further elements that can be listed with p)." But then we've used and in the definition. Well?

RESPONSUM:

…

ADDENDUM:

Description : Symbol

Disjunction :

Material implication :

Material equivalence :

Negation of material equivalence :

Negation of equality :

Therefore :

Semantic consequence :

Syntactic consequence :

Existential quantifier :

Universal quantifier :

Set membership :

Denial of set membership :

Set intersection :

Set union :

Subset :

Proper subset :

One-to-one correspondence :

Aleph :

Gamma :

Delta :

Necessity :

Possibility :

Soap warts?

INSCITIA:

Or should I call them soaplactites?

I'm talking about the way soap, left sitting in a moist place, gradually produces little bumps on its surface. I can't explain this. I failed Soapology in college. I don't know anything about the chemical structure of soap and I'm not inclined to google my way to wisdom. But here's my gambit at climbing Mt. Ignorance (scandendare mons inscitiae … or is it mountin' ignorance?).

COGITATIO:

Moisture in the air settles on the soap and softens tiny rivulets around areas that happen to be slightly harder, less soluble, than other areas. The softer areas dissolve away, flowing to some other patch of the some, even if only micrometers away, and the harder nodes are left as soaplactites. I suspect some mathematician could describe this phenomenon with chaos theory or some kind of fractal analysis. But what do I know?

RESPONSUM:

…

Invinci-tomatoes and black paper?

• Why has one cherry tomato remained firm and undecayed for months (in the sink and now in a plant pot)?

• Why does iodine turn envelope paper black?

Why stop?

Dear readers,

Or reader? I need to attend to some personal, offline biznass for a while and can´t maintain ScIn, or any other blog, indefinitely. Many thanks. Until...

The theology of sisters?

As a new Catholic, all things Catholic are new t some extent, but some things are new to a huge extent. Take nuns, for example (please, take them!). The closest you get to encountering nuns in mainstream Protestantism (my background is Presbyterianism) is either the old ladies (widows, mostly) in some Sunday school classes, or wives of the elders. So moving into the Church has left me wondering what to make of nuns (or, sisters, since I have a teeny tiny suspicion "nun" carries some Enlightenment cynicism) -- wondering and then blogging...

INSCITIA:

The theology of priests, I get: alter Christus, presbyters with bishops, community pastors, etc. But are nuns the feminine "counterpoint" for priests? What is the biblical and traditional pattern-basis for sisters?

COGITATIO:

My hunch is that nuns derive from two ecclesial sources. One, St. Paul's discussion of celibacy in I Corinthians 7. Two, the Apostle's discussion of widows in the letters to Timothy and Thessalonians (details are fuzzy at the moment, will check later). Nuns are the "counterpoint" for brothers, monks, who are just members of religious communities "in this final age" (I Cor. 7:29f). Further, I think nuns continue the tradition of widows who can be committed to service without worries of finding a spouse, etc. (I Tim 5:3).

A remaining question is, of course, how nuns came to include young women who were not only not widows but had never even married. I know Doug Wilson (or was it Doug Jones? I always get those Muscovite Calvinists mixed up) makes a big deal about this (in his stimulating little book about Christian manhood), presumably because it demonstrates "Rome erred" against Scripture with its own "man-made" traditions.

RESPONSUM:

Carbon paper?

I picked up a bubble (or boba) tea a couple of hours ago (here technically known as 波霸奶茶, which, ahem, to put it delicately, means buxom milk tea). While waiting for the goods to bubble up from behind the counter, I sat fiddling with my receipt. I was number 275. When I scratched my finger on the receipt's front surface, it left dark streaks on the paper, as if I'd used a piece of lead (or a key) to write on normal paper. One of my strongest daemons (inscitiae exterminator), or maybe it's one of my best muses (inscitiae exterminatrix), started kicking up dust, demanding more knowledge. I flipped the receipt over to scratch the back: it left no marks at all. I scratched the back very hard on the table and flipped the receipt over to its printed front:　no marks had come through that way either. Only when I scratched (lightly or hard) the printed front did I get the marks. Which got me to wondering, and then to blogging...

INSCITIA:

What accounts for these marks? And what accounts for their showing up only when I scratch the paper "head on"?

COGITATIO:

I think the paper is some cousin of carbon paper. The difference seems to be that while the latter uses carbon particles to "stain" an overlaying sheet of paper, this receipt-paper uses collapsible micro-paper fibers on the front side. The printed information on the receipt is distinct from the scratches I made, just because the former are ink, while the latter are "impression shadows" made when the micro-fibers crush together under my fingernail (sort of like being able to look through glass from above, but seeing it as basically opaque-green from the side). I envsion a tiny forest of white fibers; when you scratch them, they tubmle into a tangled mesh, and look darker from above that the treetops' tips.

But why don't they crush into marks with pressure on the back? The opposing pressure from the table would seem to crush the "trees" just like my fingernail, right?

I'm really stumped; for now all I can do is scratch my mark-free head.

RESPONSUM:

Solo priests?

Here's a riddle I just had on my new canon law blog.

INSCITIA:

Canon 904 says "priests are to celebrate [the Mass] frequently; indeed daily celebration is strongly recommended, since even if the faithful cannot be present, it is the act of Christ and the Church in which priests fulfill their principal function."

Yet, two canons later, we read: "A priest may not celebrate without participation of at least some member of the faithful, except for a just and reasonable cause."

So, uh, which is it? Frequent Mass celebration even without anyone else visibly present, or only celebrating in the presence of even a few of the faithful?

COGITATIO:

I think canon 905, which sets the context of regular worship in a normally populated faith community, offers the explanation. Canon 904 stipulates regular worship for priests under any circumstances. Canon 906 then rejects priests worshipping solo under conditions where the faithful could and should participate. Canon 905 provides the contextual hinge. I think priests are allowed to worship by themselves even without any faithful present because the Mass is an earthly-heavenly reality, so it never involves only those present to our eyes. Insisting the liturgy is only for the Church militant completely warps its transcendent dimension as heaven-on-earth. A solo priest, or a solo Christian for that matter, is an oxymoron. If however a priest chose to worship at the exclusion of the visible participation of others, he would be warping the earthly dimensions of worship, preferring an anemic disincarnated, airy gnostic spiritualism.

RESPONSUM:

Shameless self-promotion?

Does it make any sense to apologize for an act of "shameless self-promotion"? If it's shameless, there is no basis or motive for apologizing. But if it's couched in an apology, the act must be fraught with shame, no?

Maybe we should just say, "You're welcome for my shameless self-promotion!"

"When you got it, flaunt it, FLAUNT IT!" -- Max Bialystock

Reconstituted soap?

[Another one of those "Wow, Elliot's pathologically bored" posts. You're forewarned's all I'm sayin'.]

I'm a bit of a saver. Really, I'm a low-grade pack rat. But only because I'm convinced the pack rat has his advantages. More than once have I been saved time and effort because I had this-and-that tucked away "just in case."

Imagine: in the wee hours as I hurry to get clean and dressed for a flight or trip out of town, I suddenly realize I already packed my deodorant and toothpaste in my luggage the night before. Now, if I weren't a pat rack, I'd have to unzip my carefully loaded bag, dig out the toiletries, apply them, repack and re-zip the bag, thus increasing my pressure and tardiness. Fortunately, though, I keep old stubs of deodorant in my closet and shriveled tubelets of toothpaste in my bathroom for just such a last-minute deliverance (or for the case, bizarre as it may sound, when a friend needs some deo and toothpaste I haven't just used). Clearly, this is an example provided by a pat rack in defense of pat racks, but hopefully the point stands: I have lots of little "leftovers of life". (No, I don't reuse toilet paper!)

One sort of these leftovers has caught my mind's eye more than others lately, though, since I'm not sure what to do with it. I speak of my old, thin, fragile but still very usable slices of bar soap. Rather than scrubbing them down to useless shards of soap that break to pieces when you use them (you know what I'm talking about), I insist on stopping at a minimum usable mass, in the off-chance that I unwittingly run out of new soap and need some back-up without having to go to the store. (Hey, it's saved me before.) But as long as I have new soap, these old soap cards just sit there, leading me to wonder, and then to blog...

INSCITIA:

What can or should I do with these pieces of soap? (Obviously, tossing them is not an option, at least not until I move.) How can I reconstitute them?

COGITATIO:

I have considered for some time melting them all down into a new hybrid-bar (though, in reality, nearly all of them are Ivory, so the Frankensoap would be soothingly, albinously homogenous). The problem is just how to melt down the soap and, not being a soap maker, reform it into usable soap-bar condition. (It was a virtual disaster when I melted down an old coffee-bean-studded candle and tried to remold it in a cooking pot; this melt-and-mold approach is a last option.)

My proposed solution is to buy a cheap, and thus basically disposable, pot to melt the soap down, and then pour the soap sludge into a heavy plastic, soap-shaped box, letting it cool.

The only catches I see so far are 1) not knowing the melting temperature (or possible noxious fumes) of soap and thus whether it's dangerous to try melting it at home, and 2) how to remove the Frankensoap from the box after it hardens. I think I'd let it harden at room temperature and then place it in the freezer, expecting the soap to contract more than the plastic box, allowing me to pop the frigid soap out by hand.

RESPONSUM:

Always, everywhere and by everyone?

Sorry, please go here (to FCA) for this inscitia.

Coffee bulb physics?

A few weeks ago some friends near my school invited me to lunch. I went. I ate. I saw. Specifically, I saw another of the nifty glass-and-metal coffee makers I discovered when I came to Taiwan. The contraption, if memory serves, consists of a lower bulb (mini-coffee pot) for boiling water; a metal base Bunsen burner for the boiler bulb to rest on, with a small upright metal pole for holding up a metal hoop (about mini-coffee-pot high); a long glass vase with a tapered bottom (to rest in the metal hoop), joined to a glass tube by a rubber stopper; and, finally, a metal ring wrapped in nylon to filter the coffee grounds as the coffee percolates into the bulb below. The nozzle of the tube sticks into the boiler bulb.

Set the water to boil for a few minutes and it suddenly "slurps" its way up into the vase, at which point you drop in the coffee grounds. You must make sure the ring filter is secure at the base of the vase. Once you're satisfied the grounds have boiled enough, kill the Bunsen flame and the coffee drains into the bulb for serving, leaving the grounds on the nylon filter in the vase. Elegant and efficient.

What really caught my eye were two things. First, I noted how quickly and suddenly the water moved up from the bulb into the vase, and, second, how if the flame were lowered or removed for even a few moments, the coffee would slide back down into the bulb. (As long as the grounds were on the vase-side of the filter, though, you could just re-apply the heat, and the fluid would re-enter the vase.)

This whole operation -- not to mention the outrageous buzz from a laarrge midday coffee -- had me transfixed. "How did it work?" I asked, my teeth chattering on the mug. Which got me to wondering, and then to blogging...

INSCITIA:

How does this sort of coffee maker work?

COGITATIO:

My brain staggered back almost ten years to Mr. Ritter's senior physics class. Temperature... volume... pressure... Boyle's Law! Boyle's law, as far as I understand it, describes the directly proportional relationship between pressure (p), volume (V), for an ideal gas (I dream of gases!) at a constant temperature (C), to wit, p*V = C. In other words, for example, as pressure increases in a uniformly hot volume of gas, the gas's volume increases (think of a plastic bottle swelling in the sun and then hissing when you open it). Conversely, as volume increases in a constant temperature gas environment, the gas's pressure increases (think of a water balloon filling to bursting).

The interesting thing about Boyle's law, though, is that theoretically (or, operationally speaking), C need not be the constant. Any of the equation's elements could be posited as constant, though this would change some proportions from direct to inverse. To wit, at constant pressure, volume is inversely proportional to volume (p = C/V), meaning, the higher the volume, the lower the temperature. And so forth for other scenarios and operations.

I realize now that the coffee maker not only has no constant temperature as such, but also concerns fluids, not agses, so Boyle's primary law is not technically apposite in this case. But the basic idea of the law got me thinking of an explanation: in the bulb, as the water, which has a constant volume (ignoring evaporation and small ejected droplets), gets hotter, its pressure will increase. Since there is only one way out of the increasingly pressurized bulb (namely, up, up and away!), the boiling water will shoot up the tube to a lower volume. (The vase has no flame in it or on it to pressurize its contents.) As the fluid cools in the vase away from the flame, its pressure "gives in" to the air pressure in the vase, and it tries to sink back into the bulb. The constant Bunsen flame, though, prevents it from doing so, since that high temperature always "kicks" sinking fluid back to the lower pressure vase-system above.

I believe the mechanism is that heat energy raises the water's pressure in the bulb higher than the combined force of gravity and air pressure in the vase. This greater thermal, kinetic energy, according to Boyle's law, will propel the water up. Once the temperature decreases, however, the fluid succumbs to air pressure and gravity, and finds itself back in the bulb.

Voila, ou no?

RESPONSUM:

Hair today, gone tomorrow?

[WARNING: Upon reading this post, you'll think I'm either really creepy or pathologically bored. Or both. But that's the price of mounting my ignorance. Onward!]

Having grown a beard for five months recently (though I shaved it down to a gotif last week), I have picked up the habit of, well, how do I say this? Pushing any upper-lip whiskers long enough to reach into my mouth an snipping them of with my teeth. A beard trimmer on the go; and it keeps things remarkably even. The hitch is that since my fingers are near my mouth a lot to perform this nibble-trim, I can just as easily nibble-trim my nails. I used to be a very bad nail-biter (fingernails, I mean). I've gotten a lot more sanitary and less jittery for such behavior; but I still sometimes chip away at them absentmindedly. What's more, I admit there's a peculiar satisfaction in redigesting proteins that your body has processed and produced in nail- and hair-form. Waste not, want not, I say! (By the way, a hair sample is the longest lasting method of drug testing, since drug traces end up in follicles and then grow all the way up into hairs. It's impossible to bleach, wash, or dislodge the traces as long as the hair is intact.)

Finally -- full disclosure -- I must admit the hair-and-nail gourmet has a side dish: skin. Cuticles, molting calluses, etc. all cry out for some fine dental manicuring. So nibble I do. It's probably a habit I developed in response to my painful history of ingrown toenails, based on which I learned the Number One Maxim of nail care: Keep the Skin Below the Nail Edge, Otherwise the Nail Edge Below the Skin Will Burrow Into the Skin! self-grooming is a noble primate tradition, right?

So there you have it: whiskers, nails and skin, all an undeniable part of my diet. All this nibble-trimming and nail-chipping got me wondering, and then to blogging...

INSCITIA:

How long could you survive on a diet of nails, hairs and epidermal skin? What's the caloric value of such homegrown snacks?

COGITATIO:

The key is the growth rate for all these appendages. You'd have to pace your consumption to maintain a steady level of nails and hair. Maybe you could favor alternating hands every day or two. Maybe you could have a "scalp-hair feast" every few days, between which you'd sate yourself on knuckle, arm and leg hair. (And we can't forget eyebrows, eyelashes, any torso- and ear-hairs.) Meanwhile, you'd have to scrape all dead skin flakes, and even decent little bits of callused skin, off your arms and back for in-between nutrition. I think skin-cell loss would be reliable and frequent than hair- and nail-growth, so it would be your staple. I would "allow" for basic water intake (which would in turn produce some nice electrolyte-0rsih sweat to wash down whiskers al la nail).

Considering all these parameters, and how long an average human can live on total food fasting, I give this diet at least a solid two months. Consider it a radically Emersonian Akins Diet.

The slogan? "Eat at Toes!"

RESPONSUM:

No, I'm not that smart

I realize I haven't blogged here at ScIn for a number of months. Which has led me to blog.

INSCITIA:

Where has Elliot been for so long, and is he really no longer ignorant?

COGITATIO:

I think he swallowed an Omniscience Pill and hasn't stopped floating.

RESPONSUM:

It's not that I have no more ignorance; it's just that apart from a phase of groggy anti-blogging-itis, I also have been very busy offline. My "flashes of ignorance" still do come, all the time, in fact, but then wash away in a stream of more mundane knowns, leaving this blog as lifeless as a black hole.

I have a few inscitiae lined up soon, though, so stay tuned.

Spiritual boquets?

As my anything more than random readers will know, my other blog, FideCogitActio, is heavily theological and spiritual. This blog, however, is virtually "atheological" -- until now. By George, I have a case of theological inscitia!

Several weeks ago, months in fact, I was reading St. Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life when I saw him encourage making a "spiritual bouquet" to the Lord. "Make a what?" I asked myself. I gathered from the context of St. Francis's counsel that this "bouquet" was some kind of offering to God as a symbol of thanksgiving, amended life, a vow, etc. But I really couldn't tell what such a bouquet was materially: a real bouquet of lowers? a paper cut-out bouquet of flowers? a cluster of fragrant prayers? This left me wondering, and then blogging:

INSCITIA:

What is a spiritual bouquet in Catholic piety?

COGITATIO:

I think it's a series, or cluster, of prayers either in a journal, written on slips of paper, or prayed.

RESPONDUM:

Aqua boom?

Do you dream? I almost never dream. (And, to head you off at the pass, I know, I know, I know, I hear it every time: since ALL people dream, I actually DO dream, but just don't REMEMBER the dream. I know, I know, just humor me!) For the past decade or so, I am aware of remembering dreams, even aware of remembering having had a dream, perhaps a dozen times. A few nights ago made it a baker's dozen. I had a bizarre adventure dream. I'll spare you the details (mainly because my memory seems also to have spared me of them over the days), but I ended up under water, chasing a wicked fast, super-intelligent squid. Which led me to wonder, and then to blog.

INSCITIA:

Can you break the sound barrier underwater? Has it been done? What speed would you need to do so? And what would happen if you did it?

COGITATIO:

I think it is possible, but would require an incredibly fast speed. My ancient and rusted-out physics acumen reminds me altitude and air density are directly (or is it inversely?!) proportional to the sound barrier. (Something like 967 mph at sea level?) The higher you go, the thinner the air becomes, and the lower the sound barrier becomes. This is, I think, partially why planes make sonic booms at such high altitudes.

Despite my supersonic optimism, a major snag in the possibility of a subaquatic sonic boom, as far as I can see now, is the physical limits water resistance would put on a potentially supersonic subaquatic vessel (PSSV). It may be possible, for engineers to develop and pilots to handle a PSSV on the drawing board and in simulations, but I have a feeling the relatively enormous density of water, coupled with its friction and inertia, would top out any PSSV's velocity below the sound barrier.

A mere James Bond pipe dream?

RESPONSUM:

Fuzzy lasers?

Believe it or not, I'm a bit of a tech nerd. I like gadgets. One of my lingering day dreams is one day to build a droid or android. (Of course, the paradox is that I'm also a bit of a Luddite, insisting, for example, the Internet is one of the greatest spiritual challenges for modern humans and preferring simple, older-fashioned gizmos to overly ornate, multi-purpose thingamajigs. I don't like all this technical jargon, but I use it.) Being a gadget man, if a laser pointer comes my way, I'll take it. And who wouldn't? Who doesn't like shining red dots onto far buildings at night? Or making your little dog chase a bobbing red light on the floor? Or turning off the lights and making your fingertips and nostrils glow red in the darkness? Or imaginging shooting laser Morse code to aliens? These are the highest joys of any bored and precocious man (or, uh, so I hear...).

At any rate, a laser pointer did fall into my clutches a few weeks ago and I have had red fingertips ever since. I've also had more time to observe the little red light beam dangling from my key ring. Which made me wonder, and then blog.

INSCITIA:

What makes laser light look the way it does? I mean, when I focus on it, the light seems to shimmer and vibrate, like I can actually see clumps of photons swirling. Why does it look like red "TV snow"? All around the center of the laser beam, I note a sort of "photo fuzz", like a small patch of red "light fog" -- why?

COGITATIO:

I did a little reading about lasers today (the More How Stuff Works book) and suspect the visual "fuzziness" of laser light has to do with the "coherent" nature of laser light. Laser light is coherent, as far as I understand it, in that its photons have very similar, very close wavelengths. Mirrors within lasers help laser quanta converge, unlike incandescent light, which spreads its photons into many directions. As such, laser light's coherent quanta would appear clumpier to the naked eye. Unlike the wave fluctuations of incandescent photons, which escape our notice, coherent laser quanta tumble together in an apparent way. I think it must have to do with wavelength interference, but I'm not sure how.

It's a very wobbly lay-cogitatio, but hey, that's why I have this blog! Have at ye!

RESPONSUM: