indessed roscivs

Why don’t eggs from the grocery store hatch?

That was the question of the evening. Is it because they’re refrigerated? Or because they’re unfertilized? Or some other reason? If they’re unfertilized, why would hens lay unfertilized eggs? It seems counterproductive from an evolutionary perspective.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

Most commercially produced chicken eggs intended for human consumption are unfertilized, since the laying hens are kept without any roosters. Fertile eggs can be purchased and eaten as well, with little nutritional difference. Fertile eggs will not contain a developed embryo, as refrigeration prohibits cellular growth for an extended amount of time.

So, technically the answer is both, but practically it appears that the typical egg purchased from the grocery store is unfertilized. But that doesn’t answer the second question: why would hens lay unfertilized eggs? Do they always lay unfertilized eggs, like fish, which are then fertilized later? Or are they fertilized through “the usual means” if a rooster is present, with the hard shell formed later but before the egg is “birthed”?

Google tells me that, “When a rooster mates with a hen, the semen is stored in the oviduct for later use. When she gets ready to lay the egg, a sperm fertilizes the egg before the shell surrounds it. The sperm is viable for about a month in the oviduct.” That also explains why chickens lay unfertilized eggs if there’s no rooster around—I can’t imagine in the ancestral environment that a typical hen would ever go a month without seeing a rooster, so an unfertilized egg would be rather rare.

Apart from the ancestral environment, it’s worthwhile to note that, like most domesticated flora and fauna, chickens have undergone significant genetic engineering (through selective breeding) throughout the generations. The Leghorn, for example, which produces the vast majority of the world’s white eggs, has been bred to lay an egg every day like clockwork. Wild chickens probably wouldn’t have fared very well under such circumstances, but it certainly serves domesticated chickens’ genes well.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. …We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time on this world.

—Richard Dawkins, courtesy of Dinosaur Comics.

I’ve been to so many doctors and dentists in the past few weeks I’m beginning to feel like a bit of a hypochondriac. I was never raised to visit the doctor on a regular basis, much less for every little ailment that comes my way. But in the last month, I’ve seen my regular doctor, an allergy specialist, my regular dentist, a sleep apnea specialist, and an orthodontist! That’s quite the gamut.

The results of all that? My dust and cat allergies have been scientifically confirmed, nobody has any idea what’s causing my winter cough, and … I’m getting braces!

Yup, it’s official! I have an appointment set up for January 8th. I’m going to get clear brackets on the top first—they won’t be able to put brackets on my bottom teeth for a while, because I have such a severe overbite that I’d shear the brackets right off my bottom teeth if they attempted to put them on now.

The expected length of treatment is 24 to 30 months, which is pretty normal for adults. It seems like a long time, but now that I realize it could provide me with more than just a prettier smile and easier-to-clean teeth, it definitely seems worthwhile.

Of course, when I was initially setting up the appointment, and they said they have openings this coming week, I said, “You’re just taking a cast of my teeth on that appointment, right? You’re not actually putting anything on my teeth?” “Oh no!” they laughed, “We’ll be putting on the braces on that very first appointment.” Eeep! It definitely seems worthwhile, but … next week … seems so sudden … I need a while to adjust to the idea of roscivs-with-braces. So January 8th was the first opening they had in the new year. Apparently procastinating until after Christmas was quite popular.

I’ll post pictures as soon as I’ve got’em!

I have this persistent cough that refuses to go away. I’ve had it for a couple of months now and, while annoying, it’s not the end of the world, but I decided to get it checked out anyway “just in case”. The doctor thought it might be allergy-related, so she sent me to the allergy specialist to get pricked and prodded. What did I get? Forty-four tiny red dots, each an inch apart.

They shaved the underside of my arms and, with a gigantic collection of tiny plastic containers with a tiny scraper on each end, poked me forty-four times with various different allergens. I told them before the test that I figured I was allergic to cats and dust, but wanted to know if I was allergic to anything seasonal, perhaps something specific to the PNW. That might be the reason for getting a cough as the seasons were changing.

So they pricked me and sent me out to the lobby to wait twenty minutes to see what developed. And boy, did something develop! I pulled out my Nintendo DS and played Tetris, as I figured it would be the most distracting thing I could do, since they said “absolutely no scratching!” Even then I spent most of my time gritting my teeth and dropping blocks in the wrong places because the itching was so terrible! Here’s what it looked like:

(click for close-ups)

The left arm was 22 dots of PNW allergens, tree pollens of various sorts and so forth. No reactions at all. You can see all the tiny little dots quite clearly in the photo.

The right arm had some definite reactions. That top red spot is histamine, the “control” dot. Your body’s supposed to react to that one. Then there’s a dot under that that has no reaction, another “control” dot, this time with no allergens at all. Then under that is a huuuuge mark—the main bump was over an inch across, and the red surrounding the bump spread three or four inches in diameter. It was a monster. “I want to know what that one is!” I exlaimed to the specialist when they called me back in. “Dust mite,” they said. No big surprise that I was allergic to them—what surprised me, though, was how violent the reaction was! I’ve been living with dust allergies for years but they don’t really bother me (or so I thought) unless there’s a lot of dust being kicked up, e.g. from vacuuming or dusting.

The smaller spot below the dust mite spot is cats. I was suprised at how small that one was compared with dust mites, since I feel like I have a much more severe reaction to cats—but I guess I’m just more accustomed to the dust mite reactions since I have them all the time. And finally, the spot at the bottom is one type of dust itself (different from dust mites). There’s another similar spot just below it that didn’t make it into the picture, which is yet a third dust-related particle. So, I’m allergic to cats, and really allergic to pretty much everything dust-related.

So the specialist gave me a bunch of information about special bed covers and HEPA filters and vacuum cleaners and told me about getting rid of down comforters and washing the sheets every week in hot water and all the other things that you’re supposed to do to stay dust mite free. Well, that was all well and good, but I’ve been managing my dust allergies pretty well for the past twenty-some-odd years, thank you very much (usually with a pocket full of kleenex). But where did this sudden cough come from?

Still no idea. The specialist thinks (of course) that minimizing the allergens I’m exposed to will help get rid of the cough, but prescribed me a few things to try if things didn’t get better. I think I may try taking some antihistamines to see if they make any difference (my guess is they’ll reduce my sneezing habits but do nothing for the cough). But I don’t think I’ll make another visit to the doctor unless it gets worse.

Humans like classifying things. There’s no doubt about it. We often end up puttings things into categories without even realizing it. Whether it’s music, colors, movies, food, or pretty much anything else we interact with on a daily basis, we’re consciously or subconsciously attempting to slice and dice the world around us into discrete, individual groups.

There’s a very good reason for this. I didn’t really understand it until I took a class on artificial intelligence—which is, at its core, the task of trying to get a computer to do the same sort of thing. Many people have a very romantic view of artificial intelligence, but what most people in the field are actually doing is simply taking a lot of data and trying to get a computer to classify it correctly. The usual name for this is “machine learning“—amusing, since at first glance the idea of “learning” and “classification” seem to be rather unrelated.

But the thing that I discovered in this class is that, if you classify everything perfectly—that is to say, every different thing is in its own separate bucket—then there’s no way to make any sort of inferences or predictions about things you haven’t seen before.

For example, let’s say I know that white stones, when thrown at a window, will break said window, and I know that black stones will also break windows—but I’ve never seen a green stone before. How do I know if a green stone will also break a window? I have to make some sort of classification or generalization based on what I’ve seen before. White stones and black stones are both part of the “small, hard thing” category, and things in that classification break windows. If I see a green stone, and can correctly classify it as a “small, hard thing” based on its attributes, I have successfully learned something additional about green stones that wasn’t present in the data I was originally given. Green stones break windows!

Unfortunately, whenever you make these sorts of predictions or inferences, you may get things wrong some of the time. If the only things you’ve seen break windows are green stones, green metal, and green-painted bricks, then you might mistakenly think that a green feather will break windows too. Similarly, if every Frenchman you’ve met has been rude and snotty, then you might mistakenly think that all Frenchmen are conceited and haughty. This is an unfortunate side effect of classification—but the alternative (to treat every person you meet as a completely separate individual, in their own group) is to never learn anything about people you’ve never met based on people you have met who are similar to them.

There’s another major difficulty with our human tendency towards classification. The real world isn’t discrete; it’s continuous. While some songs are obviously “rap” while others obviously “pop”, some are in between. While some hues are obviously blue and others are obviously green, some are more ambiguous. Is this film a comedy or is it a drama? Are tomatoes fruits or vegetables?

Recently I heard a discussion of whether “Mexican” ought to be considered a separate language from “Spanish”, or whether it was simply a dialect. Unfortunately, there is no linguistic criteria for distinguishing between a language and a dialect. There is a saying, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy“. Why can’t linguists draw some sort of line, saying, “Everything past this point is a separate language”?

The fact of the matter is that the language-dialect spectrum is a continuum. It’s much the same as with biological species. Most intermediate forms have died out, so to the classification-happy human brain, there are distinct categories that we can place “separate languages” into just like we can place “separate species” into. But then there are exceptions like Larus gulls and Ensatina salamanders for species, or Arabic for languages.

So is Mexican a different language from Spanish? Is American a different language from English? Are either on their way towards divergence into separate languages?

It simply depends on how you define your classifications, a totally arbitrary concept imposed upon a non-discrete continuum.

Yesterday I went to see the Jaw Doctor. He was pretty amusing—very affable and more than a touch flamboyant. He had scarcely said two words to me before he was drawing diagrams on a paper towel and listing off my symptoms one by one, nailing them perfectly.

Turns out there’s a little disc at the ball joint where the jaw meets the skull. On my jaw, that disc is a little out of place, so when I open my jaw wide, the disc blocks the normal motion of the jaw, and either I get a popping sound, or I have to move my jaw “around” it, from side to side, in order to get my mouth fully open. (Or, on bad days, both—and pain to go along with it.) How did the disc get out of place? “Impossible to know,” says the doc. But the important part is that at night, I grind my teeth in such a fashion that the disc gets used to this awkward place during the night, which makes it harder (or impossible) to reverse during the day.

“Wait, what? I don’t grind my teeth,” I insist. My wife perfectly labeled every other symptom I had, which put me perfectly into the TMJ/Sleep Apnea group of folks. But she didn’t mention anything about teeth grinding.
“Yeah, you do,” replied the doctor.
“But the dentist looked at my teeth and didn’t see any signs of wear,” I told him.
“Everyone with TMJ grinds their teeth at night. You grind your teeth, trust me.”

He peered into my mouth and took a look at the molars. He seemed puzzled for a minute—aha! I thought. See? Then he started having me move my jaw around. “Bring your lower jaw forward a bit. Now move it to the side. A little more. Now move it forward a bit more. Yeah. Perfect! The puzzle has been solved!” He brought out a mirror and showed me my mouth.

It was in the most awkward position ever, a strange jutting out of the bottom teeth and shoved to the side. But when I looked in the mirror, the teeth kind of looked like they “fit” in a weird sort of way. There was a little notch or chip on the edge of one tooth that fit perfectly with the others.

I was still unconvinced, but hey—he’s the doctor—he must know something. But it seemed to me that he was trying to find any evidence that fit his conclusion—that I grind my teeth at night—rather than vice-versa. Plus, he was recommending a little plastic device (like a retainer) to fit into my mouth at night to keep me from grinding, and a nice treatment program to the tune of several thousand bucks. He sent me home with some muscle relaxant pills and a page full of things I could do to ease my symptoms, and a recommendation for a sleep test to validate his sleep apnea pronouncement.

For the rest of the day, I tried to keep my jaw in as relaxed a position as possible, just as he’d recommended. (It’s somewhat difficult to keep something relaxed when you’re so concentrated on it, though.) I also did some internet searching of my own, looking at diagrams and recommendations from other doctors and dentists. I found a site that had some cool exercises, and tried a few of those—like opening and closing slowly in front of a mirror, trying to keep the motion as straight as possible. My jaw was going all over the place, left to right then right to left. It was insanely difficult to try to keep the motion pure.

Then, last night, I took a few of the muscle relaxant pills and went to bed. “They’re supposed to make you drowsy,” I joked to my wife, “I can feel them working already!” I’m notorious for my ability to fall asleep within minutes of head hitting pillow.

But last night, tossing and turning into position, just as I was about to fall asleep, I suddenly noticed my jaw moving—moving in a strange way—settling down exactly into that bizarre, awkward, perfectly-fitting-together position I had uncomfortably performed in a dentist’s chair earlier that day! I was instantly jolted awake. He was right!

Every night, my jaw moves into that position and locks there, letting me sleep peacefully—but shoving that tiny disc back into that position it’s not supposed to be in. I tried several times to fall asleep, but every time, my jaw would sneak slowly back into that strange and crazy position, jutting out and locked to the side. It feels so awkward to even try to replicate it while awake, but it was the most natural thing lying there in bed in the middle of the night. I eventually had to change positions completely in order to fall asleep with my jaw in a relaxed position, but I succeeded. I don’t know if I stayed the whole night without my jaw locking, but when I woke up it was still relaxed, and I realized in that moment that every other morning I’d woken up with considerably more muscle tension in my jaw than I did this morning.

As I ate breakfast and brushed my teeth and went about my morning routine with this newfound relaxed jaw, I noticed something very strange. In this position, some of my more awkwardly-positioned teeth were getting dangerously close to my upper teeth. Suddenly I had a flash of insight.

I used to have this problem where, occasionally, when I bit down or otherwise moved my mouth quickly, I’d hit my upper teeth on my out-of-position lower teeth in a terribly painful way. It would only happen a few times a year, but when it did—owwww! It was the worst experience ever. But I haven’t had this problem in years. It’s pretty much gone away completely.

Or had it? The feelings I had back then, of some uncomfortable near-misses, I was starting to remember. “That’s how it started,” I realized. “That’s how it must have started.” After a few of these ultra-painful collisions, my body figured out a way to avoid them—by moving the jaw in a different way. This different jaw motion eventually got picked up as a night-time habit, and the night-time habit eventually moved this disc into its now-uncomfortable position.

And, of course, it still might have something to do with my wisdom teeth removal (the problems started happening shortly afterwards). Perhaps the teeth shifted due to the extra room in the mouth enough to exacerbate the problem? Who knows—it’s all theoretical anyway. “Impossible to know,” as the doctor said. But it certainly seems like a likely explanation.

So now, I want orthodontics more than I ever have wanted them before. It’s not to have a nicer smile. It’s not even for improved dental hygiene. Braces could mean, for me, an entirely different way of life.

A recent poll revealed that about half of Americans don’t “believe in evolution”. (Interestingly enough, a quarter of Americans believe that both evolution and creationism are correct.)

But such polls always make me wonder how they’re worded. “Evolution” is a very vague word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I’d much prefer a different sort of poll where people were given statements like these and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each one. I wonder if we’d see a considerably different picture of the American populace?

• The earth is (at least) millions of years old
• Life has been present on this earth for (at least) millions of years
• Strata dating is generally accurate
• Radiometric dating is generally accurate
• Fossils of species show up in different eras of the fossil record,
  with more complex species appearing later
• All life on earth is based on the same DNA=>RNA=>Protein transcription
  process
• All change between generations within a species is due to mutation,
  crossing over, and similar DNA recombination (i.e. other theories such
  as Lamarckism [heritability of acquired characterists] are false)
• Within a single species, there can be different “subspecies” which could
  interbreed but do typically not
• The ability of subspecies to interbreed is not transitive; in other
  words, there exist subspecies A, B, and C such that A and B can
  interbreed, B and C can interbreed, but A and C cannot interbreed
• Over time, two subspecies that could previously interbreed lose (for
  various reasons) the ability to interbreed and become different species
• The more recently two species split, the more of their DNA they generally share
• Vestigial structures (such as limbs on snakes and whales or degenerate
  eyes on cave-dwelling fish) give us clues to the ancestry of species
• It is theoretically possible to explain all the complexity of life
  (e.g. eyes, bat sonar, etc.) through some process of genetic variation
  and selection
• The theory currently with the most evidence that explains the origin
  of the species is that all species of life on the planet evolved from
  single-celled organisms

Do you “believe in evolution”? Are there any statements above that you disagree with?

Yesterday I talked a bit about the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. Frequently, in discussions of human-caused extinctions, I hear sentiments expressed such as, “Well, such an extinction is lamentable, but in the end it was just Darwinism in action. Humans are part of nature too, and the now-extinct species just couldn’t evolve to co-exist with the human species.”

This sort of attitude betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. There is no normative aspect of “Darwinism” or natural selection. “Evolution” is a word that is used to describe a process in nature, just like “global warming” or “gravity” or “forest fire cycle”. It’s not some mystical ideal we should aspire to, nor is it something that human activity cannot alter. Of course, just like global warming, gravity, and forest fire cycles, neither does it mean that we should actively try to alter the process, nor does it mean we shouldn’t research the likely results of our attempts (such as whether or not they have a chance of success).

There’s a similarly mistaken popular idea that evolution is some natural force that drives species inexorably toward some higher purpose, or represents a progression to more complex and sophisticated organisms. You see this all the time in how people use the word “evolve” in non-biological contexts to mean “improved into something better or more sophisticated,” as opposed to simply “change”. The late Stephen Jay Gould discusses this misunderstanding at considerable length in his book Full House.

Humans may not have any responsibility to prevent the extinction of all species (some estimate as many as 30,000 species go extinct every year), but when it comes to actively causing the extinction of species, we should at least take a hard look at the real cost of our actions, rather than trying to absolve ourselves of blame by invoking some mythical, unstoppable hand of Darwinism.

I always thought that carrier pigeons were birds that were used in World War I to send messages (by attaching bits of paper to the pigeon’s leg and having them fly home), but were now extinct. Turns out I was wrong—one of the many duped by the pigeon triumvirate.

Turns out there are three different types of pigeons commonly confused by the uninitiated (such as myself): passenger, carrier, and homing. Only one of these is extinct, and it was (so far as I can tell) never actually used for delivering messages. The other two are actually the same species, and are not so much as endangered. Both of them have been used for hundreds of years for the pupose of message transportation.

The “passenger” is the only of the three that is extinct; the last one died in a zoo in 1914. I haven’t been able to figure out why it was called a “Passenger pigeon,” since it doesn’t seem to have ever been used to carry messages (or passengers, for that matter). However, it used to be the most common bird in North America. Audubon wrote of them in the early 1800s,

As I traveled on, the air was literally filled with pigeons. The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses.

Before sunset I reached Louisville, Kentucky. The pigeons passed in undiminished number, and continued to do so for three days in succession. The people were all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting at the pilgrims, which flew lower as they passed over the river. Multitudes were thus destroyed. For a week or more, the population fed on no flesh other that of pigeons, and talked of nothing but pigeons.

They were easy to kill, and good to eat, and by the late 1800s had all but disappeared.

The “carrier” and “homing” pigeons, on the other hand, are actually the same species: columba livia. They are, however, entirely different breeds. Both can be trained to find their way home, although homing pigeons are much more commonly used today. Carrier pigeons were used by the ancient Egyptians and the Persians, according to Wikipedia, and were even used to proclaim the winner of the Olympics.

Homing pigeons have been trained and bred to find their way home over particularly long distances, and messages are typically written on very light paper, rolled into a tube, and attached to the bird’s leg (although some have started using tiny computer disks). Homing pigeons are, like carrier pigeons, thriving and well—nowhere near extinct. It was homing pigeons that were used in World War I (and II). Flying hundreds of miles back to their home is a normal task for homing pigeons—the world record is 1689 miles. There are all sorts of theories as to why these pigeons are so good at what they do, ranging from sensing the magnetic field of the earth, to navigating via atmospheric odors, or just by noting landmarks like humans do.

So next time you encounter a mention of one of the members of the pigeon triumvirate, hopefully these tidbits of information will mean that you won’t be caught unawares as I was.