Hide and seek

Almost two weeks ago, a sperm whale was found stranded on the beach in Knokke-Heist, a small town along the Belgian coastline. It goes without saying that it was obviously found: sperm whales don't really qualify as excellent creatures to play hide and seek with. Especially not when compared with the reigning world champion, a dwarf chameleon living in Madagascar. It's only fair to add that this tiny creature (growing at a maximal length of 30 millimeters, from snout to tail) must have had access to a decent manual on basic hide and seek strategies (damp rain forests are somewhat better than stretches of beach, when plotted on a degree-of-shelter scale), but still: unlike the sperm whale, it took scientists up to a few days ago to discover this peculiar reptile...

As always the stranding of a sperm whale, the biggest mammal known to men - unless there is a creature playing hide and seek to perfection, lead to a bunch of newspaper articles and buses of disaster tourists, staring at zealous biologists cutting the carcass into pieces for further investigation. That, and energy production: the creature will be recycled, in the sense that its body fat will be converted into renewable energy. As a matter of fact, 12 and a half tonnes (roughly half of its total weight) of biomass can produce the equivalent of what 14 families consume in the span of a whole year!

By far the most heart-warming piece of documentation, was an interview with the family of Theofiel De Groote, after whom the sperm whale was named. This man had a name that rung like a bell, even before the unfortunate creature beached itself. Unless you weren't part of the fishermen community in Knokke-Heist, that is, as he was a famous shipowner often setting sail to Iceland. Theofiel passed away in 2010, leaving behind his wife Simonne who declared to be proud that the whale was named after her late husband. I found that rather sweet, especially because it had a rather unconditional air to it. I mean, for all we know this mammal could have been the dork amongst the sperm whales. It's not that I want to ruin the party, but Theofiel De Groote may have been bullied around at Whale School, because he was too fat (don't worry Theofiel, your additional biomass will serve a great purpose) or because he had a strangely shaped head (don't worry Theofiel, your cranium may serve as the topic of a rather mystifying PhD-thesis). As a matter of fact, Theofiel's stranding along the Belgian coastline may have been a final attempt to finally find peace and quiet. In which case his solution, beaching itself in Belgium, can hardly be called a bright solution - can it?

If I ever happen to reincarnate as a bullied sperm whale with a disfigured head and a rather strong inclination towards suicide, I would at least find myself a nice stretch of beach in the Caribbean Islands; being mourned over by a bunch of half-naked locals - trying everything they can to keep me alive, splashing coloured cocktails and lukewarm ocean water over my body, feeding me shrimps from the BBQ, playing chilled reggae tunes to relax me - doesn't seem that bad to me. So yes, I thought the interview with Simonne was heart-warming: after all, who knows how the underwater world thought about what will forever live on as a whale in our minds...

Bananas?

A few weeks ago, one of the Muslim clerics in Europe warned Muslim women not to get too close to bananas, cucumbers or other phallus-shaped vegetables, in order to avoid sexual thoughts. The unnamed cleric, whose directive was featured in an article in a religious publication, added that if women wanted to eat these food items, they should address a third party - preferably a male related to them, such as their husband or father - to cut the vegetables into pieces before serving. 

(a) This could be me being a bit weird, but have you ever walked through the fruit and vegetable aisle at the supermarket, trying not to give in to sexual thoughts? It must be easy though, if fruits and vegetables make you feel horny. Think about all these supermarkets advertising their weekly deals in a glossy, colourful magazines. My life as a 16-year-old could have been a lot easier, with an abundance of free porn magazines getting shoved into the mailbox. 

(b) Why is it that only Muslim women were addressed. Straight Muslim women, to be more precise. To me, it seems pretty obvious that men should no longer be allowed to get too close to melons, grapefruits, tomatoes, oranges and apples. Unless they're gay, I guess. But if you think about it, virtually any piece of fruit or vegetable is either phallic (carrots, corncobs, zucchini, eggplants and French beans, just to name a few) or erhm... yonic. Which makes perfect sense of course, as fruits are essentially the structures of a plant containing its seeds. You'd better not be a bisexual Muslim, if you'd ask me...

(c) Why consider fruits and vegetables only? How about toothbrushes and vacuum cleaners, pens and pencils or brooms and soup mixers? I could be on a roll now, but to me these objects look pretty phallic as well. And I'm not sure there's much room for innovation, as I would not like to brush my teeth with a device that is not shaped like a stick...

Sounds like someone deserves being hit by a baseball bat. Or a medicine ball, depending on his sexual orientation of course...

Twitter and God

Judging from the fact that most of you came to this particular page through Facebook, I’m guessing  most of us are no stranger to the social media anymore. Or are you? Today I saw a picture being shared furiously on the aforementioned social network, which explained eight different social media in a funny way. What was less funny to me was the fact that I had never heard of five of them: foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Last.fm and G+ are total strangers to me. (Okay, I know G+ stands for Google+ but I have no idea how it works).

So that’s five out of eight, but which three are missing? Obviously the most popular ones, since even I know them. There’s Facebook, duh. YouTube, that’s another one. And finally there’s Twitter – which only last week was in the news.

The occasion was that recently the first major study was concluded as to the relevance of Twitter. As you probably know, this rapidly growing microblogging service enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters. Some use it for personal reasons, as a kind of online version of cell-phone text messages (sms), while others follow or write tweets in a more professional context, like the political media or cultural scene. The conclusion of the study was that a good tweet is relatively rare. It seems only 36% percent of them are experienced by the users as ‘interesting’.

Of course this is a difficult criterion. Suppose I asked you to rate your current email inbox. What percentage would you rate as ‘interesting’? Moreover, if a certain account you follow on Twitter is not interesting anymore, you can easily unfollow it. Indeed, whereas with Facebook you need permission to follow someone’s account, with Twitter you can instantly follow anyone you want. Personally, for instance, I follow @BarackObama, @ParisHilton and even @jesus. The sky is the limit, pardon the pun.

Which brings me to the following. To give you a small sample of how Twitter works, I thought I’d give you a selection of Ricky Gervais’ tweets. Besides an outrageously funny comic, he’s an animal rights activist, a humanitarian and a convinced atheist. Above all, Ricky Gervais is not afraid to speak his mind about what he believes in.

About God and religion, for instance. A while ago Gervais got caught up in a discussion about religious matters. I don’t know exactly when it started, but it seemed to speed up after this tweet:

@rickygervais And this photo is NOT me a dressed as Jesus. It's from The Invention Of Lying. And even if it was, so fucking what? http://pic.twitter.com/DhOD7lF1

20 Jan

What followed was a veritable bombardment of Gervais on Twitter by people who tried to convince him to believe in this or that God or religion. Here’s some of the funnier ones (in quotes “ ”), most of the  time with Gervais’ answers immediately following:

@rickygervais “@HerNameIsDawn: @rickygervais What do you think happens to the mind after you die?” The same as what happens to your voice

24 Jan

@rickygervais “@ckleass: do you have any friends who r Christian?” Yes. & Jewish & Muslim. I've also friends who love GLEE. We don't have to always agree

25 Jan

@rickygervais Ask yourself why you don't believe in all the other gods. Your answer, is why I don't believe in yours. This endeth the religious tweets.

25 Jan

@rickygervais “@jskrew: I believe in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny- what religion is that?" As valid as any other.

29 Jan

@rickygervais “@LeoDukes: Here's a thought! I'm a fan who enjoys your works, but Im sick of you going on about religion. Should I stop following?” Yes

1 Feb

@rickygervais “@ChallonGoodeRVC: @lewisdent @billybasset1 there's heaps of proof of Gods existence!” Go on...?

3 Feb

@rickygervais “@Graeme289: oh man give it a rest about god .....” Sorry for tweeting you all the time Graeme I...oh hold on, YOU'RE following ME. #gorp

3 Feb

Now who said comedy and philosophy couldn’t go together?

Ricky, if we had one, we would award you the 2012 Fred and Fred prize!

Pissed off

Ah, the news. Always new opportunities to get irritated, frustrated or downright angry. During the past few days, a particular article had me raise my eyebrows...

You might have seen the video featuring American soldiers urinating on dead Afghan bodies. The 40-second clip, showing four men in combat gear exposing their genitals and relieving themselves whilst making bad jokes ("Have a great day buddy, golden like a shower!"), went around the world quickly and sparked outrage and a possible diplomatic row between Washington and Kabul. Even the Pentagon spokesman said the video was deeply troubling, and added "Whoever it was, and whatever the circumstances, it is egregious behaviour." Understandable, right? 

In a sense - a very weird one, that is, because the comparison I am about to make is more farfetched than a massive cruise ship running aground off the Italian coast, because the captain felt like waving his family (and a few other people, may they rest in peace) goodbye - this all reminds me of a discussion I had when I was 21 years old. I used to be a member of WINA at that time, the student organization associated to our mathematics department. As a matter of fact, I was in charge of taming the freshmen at our cantus activities (schachtentemmer, if that makes sense to you). 

To be more precise, this also implied that I had the final responsibilities over the student initiation ceremony (for those of you who are not familiar with this: it's a kind of passage rite, involving lots of beer, some nudity, oodles of ingredients to make pancakes and, of course, even more beer). Even today, I can still clearly recall that one particular moment when some of my fellow WINA members asked me whether they were allowed to 'wash' the students that very night. When I asked them what they meant by that, they gave me a 'you-idiot, isn't-that-plain-obvious'-look and added "Spit on them, of course!". I wasn't shocked, I knew far worse stories from other student organizations, but I obviously answered that they weren't. Because to me, student initiations were (and still are) all about recruiting people, engaging them in social activities and offering them a night of fun to remember for the rest of their lives - despite the alcohol. As opposed to what some people believe, it is not about humiliating people. 

So why am I telling you this? What does it have to do with US soldiers urinating on Afghan war victims, facing severe punishment because of (and I quote) this apparent desecration of the dead as a violation of our nation's military regulations and of international laws of war prohibiting such disgusting and immoral actions? I will tell you why: because this reasoning pisses me off badly. I find it very ironic - in a bad sense of the word - that people are judged as immoral because of something they did during a fucking war. It wasn't a cantus, nor a social activity meant to bring people closer together or to offer them an experience to remember forever (I am afraid that soldiers are returning with enough experiences they'd rather not remember). It happened during a conflict which, by its very definition, leads to mortality and human behaviour defying what we consider to be 'right'.

I am no expert, nor a philosopher - merely a pacifist with a humble opinion I feel like sharing - but according to me it doesn't make sense to make rules about what is okay and what is not during a war. Because the act of declaring and fighting a war itself is not okay. Period. Who are we to judge people who were actually trained to kill other people, from behind our desks or the comfort zones we tend to call 'houses'? Do not get me wrong (repeat twice!), I am by no means saying that what these soldiers did is morally right, but I am questioning the very concept of making rules about something that should not be in the first place. Amen. 

LinkedIn: Zap a Day (or a Year)

A while ago I was surfing Humo’s site, when I came across an amusing link to http://www.zapaday.com. Now Zap a Day is a website that offers you tomorrow’s news. Literally. So if you’d click the link right now on Thursday 12 January 2012 you’d get the news for Friday 13 January 2012. Now how’s that possible?, you might ask. Well, it’s actually not that difficult. Most stories are about something that was planned, like elections, referenda, awards and stuff like that. If they’ve been planned for weeks, it’s not too hard to predict that tomorrow the end results of the Egyptian election will be made public. And because we know most partial results already, the general outcome isn’t too hard to predict.

Now when I told my friend E. about this over lunch today, she immediately asked a very good question. What’s the idea behind a site like Zap a Day? Obviously, it’s always going to be half-parody, but is it all comedy or is there a deeper message? So we started thinking. Perhaps Zap a Day shows us how little ‘new’ our ‘news’ actually is? Indeed, when you think about it, much of the news is actually quite predictable and logical. If you know there’s going to be a certain issue on the parliamentary agenda, it’s quite easy to predict what party x or politician y is going to say about it, how the votes will be cast, or what certain journalists will write about it in the newspaper. In this way, it seems neither the news nor the news coverage is very new anymore.

When I rode the train home from work, the subject kept going through my head, and I was suddenly reminded of an idea I’ve often toyed with before. As a regular reader of newspapers on the one hand and news sites and blogs on the other hand, I’ve noticed that newspapers are really in no position anymore to compete with online journalism. Indeed, in our modern world in general, and in the news business in particular, nothing is as important as speed. In the past announcers used to stand on corners every morning, shouting: ‘Yesterday’s plain crash. Read all about it in today’s paper!’. But of course, nowadays that’s ridiculous. Most events can be read about minutes after they’ve happened, and through Twitter - which is rapidly becoming the leading journalistic media channel - even as they’re happening. It seems inevitable, therefore, that the printed newspaper is going to go the way of the dodo.

I must say that I don’t particularly like the idea of that - there’s something quite heavenly about the weekend’s paper with a cup of coffee on a lazy Sunday morning - but still it seems inescapable. Or is it? Personally I do believe that newspapers will continue to exist for quite some time, but obviously they’re going to have to change. Already they’ve shifted from focussing on news coverage per se, to opinion pieces, magazine-esk spreads about tourism or food, and essays on culture. But is there something more we can do?

Well, this is where my little idea comes in. Somewhat similarly to Zap a Day, I’ve often wondered about the notion of a newspaper that doesn’t cover today’s news, but that of one year ago. Zap a Year, if you will. Indeed, to me the printed page is predominantly a space to study (my friend E. attended me to that too!), so it would be the ideal environment not for trying to compete with Twitter or news sites, but for the deeper analysis of significant events in the past. In this way, we could create a crossing between a newspaper and a history book. That’s it: The History Paper.

For instance, one year ago, on Wednesday 12 January 2011, a big story in the news was a wake organised for the victims of the most recent US school shooting, in Arizona. Even President Obama and his wife Michele were present. In the articles about the topic, commentators raised the issue of gun possession in the US and its citizens’ trigger-happy mentality. However, due to the Japanese tsunami and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima that soon followed, this topic of the Arizona school shooting was completely drowned (pardon the pun) in other, more pressing news. But today I would like to know - one year after - what really happened in the end. How many people did end up losing their lives? Because we often only hear about those dying on the day itself, not about those in hospital fighting for their lives in the days, weeks, months after. Have new measures been taken in the US schools to prevent something like that happening? Has it happened again since the incident in Arizona? Etcetera.

There were many things in the news on 12-01-11 that I’d like to know the outcome of today. Like the charges brought against Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Does anyone remember what ultimately happened to that guy? Or the death of Johan Vande Lannotte’s mother, precisely when he had to lead the intense debates about the formation of our government. Discussed on a full two-page spread on 12-01-11, but completely forgotten by 12-01-12.

Unless by Vande Lannotte himself, of course. And by his family, who probably miss their grandmother. And by her husband, who was left to go on by himself. Or had he already passed too? I don’t know.

Let’s tell these stories. In a well-researched, nuanced paper that occasionally will rub off ink on your hands. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The MJ conspiracy

Today I read a story in the papers that reminded me of a very distinct childhood memory. I think I must have been about eight or maybe nine and on holiday in Spain. I was playing in the pool with some newly made Dutch friends, when all of a sudden they introduced a new kid. And the new kid was black. That’s right. It may strike you as funny but at that age (late 80s) I had never seen a black person in person. I remember going up to the kid, who was about my age, and asking him in all my childish naiveté if I could touch his skin. I guess I just wanted to know what black skin felt like. He said yes and so I stuck out a little finger and poked him in the forearm. I remember clearly that I was very surprised. I had expected the skin to feel different, perhaps more coarse I don’t know, but I was astonished to find that his skin felt just like mine. ‘Well what do you know,’ I told my parents that afternoon, ‘they’re just like we are!’.

I’m never quite sure whether this story means that at age eight I was essentially a racist or not. Sure, my conclusion was that we were no different from each other, but still I had expected that there would be a difference and I based that assumption (perhaps ‘prejudice’ is a better word?) on racial grounds. However, in the end I guess that whatever my basic attitude, I learned the correct lesson: that although there is an undeniable difference in appearance between races, appearance is as far as the difference goes…

At the same time, there is that difference, but even as I’m typing this I feel that we’re not really comfortable discussing that. After all, why discuss it, if it doesn’t matter, right?

Well, let’s go back to the newspaper article I mentioned earlier. It’s about Michael Jackson’s daughter, Paris Katherine Jackson (°1998), who is going into acting. In the article she is just called his daughter, but you see, I have a theory about MJ’s kids – at least about the first two, the oldest is known as ‘Prince’ (°1997) – and it’s quite simple: I’m not really convinced they’re his.

My reasons? Simple observation, really.

Here’s a picture of Michael with his father (Joseph Walter "Joe" Jackson) and his mother (Katherine Esther Scruse):

They are both black people (they’re not of mixed heritage, which could explain things further down the family tree), and therefore their child, Michael, was a black person too:

Now we all know that somewhere along the way Michael turned himself from a handsome black man into a scary white woman. You know what I mean, but here’s a pic anyway.

Bear in mind, though, that these changes were done with plastic surgery, i.e. skin transplants and skin products. They are not genetic. Michael’s DNA is what it always was, that of a negroid man.

Now, have a look at Michael’s partner, Debbie Rowe, who was MJ’s partner from 1996 to 1999, and who is Prince’s and Paris’ mother:

Now genetics dictate that MJ and Rowe’s children should be of mixed heritage. Someone like Halle Berry, for instance, whose mother is of European descent and whose father is African-American, or like Barack Obama, who is the son of a father from Kenya and a European American mother.

So we should expect MJ’s children to look something like that. Instead this is what his daughter and son look like:

Now does that seem right to you? Indeed, there have been persistent rumours, especially about Prince’s father being someone else. (By the way, there are no Wikipedia pages with detailed information on any of the Jackson children!) And let’s be honest, who would be surprised to find out that Wacko Jacko’s kids were really someone else’s? Isn’t it quite possible that a person who obviously had a pathological wish to be a white person, faked having white children?

So is our culture just too politically correct to ask these questions, or am I still, after all these years, being racist when I’m surprised that a black person’s kids don’t look black enough?

I wonder.

Only in... Japan

This morning, I read in the newspaper that Japan officially announced it will restart its whale hunting tradition in the Antarctic waters. Once again, they defended their practices with the claim that they do this out of scientific necessity. I was shocked; not only because of the sad contents of this very announcement, but also because the journalist claimed that Japan uses money which was donated after the tsunami disaster last year. Whether this is true or not - I guess it's hard to retrace where the money came from in the first place - it still doesn't really make sense "to put $35 million aside to protect our whale hunting vessels" (official announcement by the Japanese government). As Paul Watson (captain of the Sea Shepherd, the international agency against whale hunting) puts it: "this is an insult against all nations that generously supported Japan after the tsunami!". He is right, of course, as there is no excuse whatsoever to hunt one of the most majestic creatures inhabiting our planet. Not even ambergris can serve as a justification for this loathsome decision...

Even I feel like I'm in a (pink ginger) pickle right now. On the one hand, both Fred and I simply love Japan. The food, the movies, the cultural traditions and - let's be honest - oddities, the language, the sumo wrestling and so on. A common passion which has led to our first trip together, last year: we went to the land of the rising sun to celebrate New Year's Eve in samurai style. On the other hand, I also donated money after the disaster and the idea that I financially contributed to whale hunting pains me a lot. That is why I decided to start a new topic, in which I will try to get rid of this ambiguous feeling by gently mocking Japan and some of its typicalities.

Today, I have decided to turn my attention to J-wear. Unless you are related to Dirk Frimout or Frank De Winne, it seems rather unlikely that you are familiar with this product: J-wear refers to experimental hi-tech undies, especially designed for astronauts at a Japanese university by a team of female scientists. First of all, I find it rather funny to think about the people conducting the research which has led to this particular kind of underwear. I mean, imagine walking into your soon-to-be supervisor's office, where some hyper-enthousiastic professor is trying to talk you into optimizing underwear. You may advocate textile engineering as much as you want, but this basically amounts to investigating samples (as in 'dirty underwear') and verifying data (plotting colour versus time, I suppose). Sounds like fun!

Secondly, the product itself is a bit of a stretch itself: J-wear is (well, was, at the time) a new type of anti-bacterial, water-absorbent, odor-eliminating fire-proof clothing designed for space travel. So, this thing absorbs water, which means that we are basically talking about hi-tech diapers - right? I can live with the idea that the result should be anti-bacterial and odor-eliminating, although I do wonder whether this implies that 'basic hygiene' was cancelled from the space shuttle equation. But the fire-proof property? What the hell? We are talking about astronauts: people risking their lives in the name of science, traveling towards unknown territory in rockets. As in: things which may explode. Heavily. I seriously wonder whether these people will be able to take comfort in the fact that they can be blown to shreds - burnt to a degree which exceeds numbers 3, 4 and 5 - knowing that their balls are save. Fire-proof underwear, jay-wear!

I do hope the Sea Shepherd carries missiles. I am pretty sure whale hunters haven't heard from it...

Mrs. Robinson

Research is a fascinating thing. Only today I read on The New Scientist that after additional observations our beloved neutrinos seem to continue their quarky behaviour and might after all be able to travel faster than the speed of light (story here). If it were true (and I still think we need to be careful), it would be a jaw-dropping finding.

Just think about it. We’re able to send people to the moon, soon even to Mars. We can operate on people’s brain while they are awake. We are about to replace solar panels with a kind of ink that contains silicium nano solar cells, which means that we can print energy cells on paper! And still we do not fully understand one of the most basic things in the world: how fast stuff can move. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do once we do understand it!

And this, dear reader, is why it’s such a privilege to be part of the group of people that can contribute to our understanding of things - even if, in Fred and Fred’s case, that involves questions about stuff which might seem much more trivial than the behaviour of neutrinos. Moreover, it is also the reason why scientists and scholars should take their job as serious as they possible can. But regrettably they do not always do so. A year or two ago, I was shocked to hear that a philosophy professor, whom at one point I was very close to working with for a year, had been fired for plagiarizing on a massive scale. And lately, there seem to be more and more cases of the same deontological tomfoolery. Only recently there was the case of a sociology professor who made up his own research data (story here, on Wikipedia no less!) and yesterday I read about a cardiology professor doing something similar (story here). And it baffles me. If you truly believe in your sacred - and yes, that's the word for me - mission as a researcher, namely to discover new information about ourselves and the world we live in, how can you then knowingly spread false information? It's beyond me.

Anyway, I'm on this high horse because today I was confronted with some bad research myself. No cases of plagiarism or anything as bad as that, but still. The last week I have been working my way through pages and pages of Latin correspondence between Erasmus and one of his Frisian acquaintances, since I have been invited to speak about the topic at the end of the month. Now when doing research I like to form my own opinion about a subject before reading papers by others that involve the same or a similar topic. Just to be objective, you know. So this morning I finally started looking at some of the articles I had gathered. One of them, by a certain Mrs. Robinson, was published in 2004 in a journal that has an IT-B ranking (with IT-A being the highest possible, think Nature or Science) and discusses some of the aforementioned correspondence while tackling a different issue. Now just imagine my jaw dropping when I discovered that not one of Mrs. Robinson's statements, not one, about these documents is correct. Apparently she misunderstood them, all of them. And so the world is left with just a little bit more false information. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!

On her online cv (where she also proudly posted an online version of the paper horribilis) I read that Mrs. Robinson (a PhD in classics by the way) is also an artist. God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson - but stick to art in the future, will you? At least that doesn't have anything to do with the truth.

Koo-koo-ka-fucking-choo, Mrs. Robinson.

Jennie from the block

A recent online news article reported the story of Jessie, an Australian cat who disappeared from Berry Springs (just outside the far northern end of Darwin), shortly after her owners moved in from their old house somewhere in South Australia's Eyre Peninsula. Both places are separated by nearly 2000 miles and a vast, inhospitable desert, but one year after her disappearance the new residents of Mrs. Gale's old house found a strange cat hanging around. They took a picture and sent it to Berry Springs. It turned out to be Gale's cat... Despite the odds, Mrs. Gale believes that her cat walked all the way back, "because she hates getting into cars". This is definitely an amazing story, but what bothers me about it is that nobody ever considered interviewing Jennie.

Which is exactly why I rang her up last night.

(F) Hi Jennie, how are you doing?

(J) Hi Fred, long time no speak! Thanks for asking. I do feel better now, back home, although I wish the new tenants would stop staring at me like I come from another planet.

(snorts)

Well, I do, but let's all just stick to our jobs, okay? Dogs do the leg-humping, you get uncomfortable when we follow you into the bathroom and we do the staring. Right?

(F) Jennie, rumour has it that you walked all the way back from Darwin. Is that true?

(J) Are they all out of their fucking minds? Of course not! Seriously, whoever said that needs to have a look at a real cat. There's a reason why we basically live on people's couches, you see? That's because we prefer to sleep, stare and snack. Repeatedly. That, and follow you to the bathroom. The most active thing I ever did was to chase my own tail, you know?

(F) But how did you get back South then?

(J) I just hid myself in a truck, moving couches from a factory in Darwin to retail sellers in the South.

(F) Isn't that dangerous? I mean, how did you prepare yourself for that?

(J) Of course it's dangerous Fred! As long as nobody opened the truck I was both dead and alive. And believe me, that's not a very nice feeling. But I have years of experience: ever since I was a little kitten, I made a habit of crawling into unattended boxes. So I knew how to survive a collapse of the wave-function.

(F) Just one more question Jennie. Why did you decide to go back?

(J) The curtains, Fred, the curtains. Nothings beats dangling from the vintage draperies at home.

The Ig Nobel Prizes

You might have read about them in the paper today, but obviously there is only one source that you can trust on a topic like this: your faithful Fred and Fred. If ever something was right up our alley, it’s the Ig Nobel Prizes.

In case you missed it: the Ig Nobel Prizes (a pun on ignoble and Nobel) are awarded each year in October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’.

Yesterday the 21st award ceremony took place at Harvard University, and a Leuven professor was on the receiving end. Indeed, Luk Warlop, together with a number of colleagues, received the prize for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things – when they have a strong urge to urinate.

Funny, innit? And it gets even better if you remember that the Ig Nobel Prizes are almost always presented (by genuine Nobel laureates, by the way!) to actual researchers who have been labouring for years on extraordinarily difficult, but seemingly trivial or absurd topics. Just imagine what some academics apply themselves to. Here’s a small sample of the prizes over the years:

• Literature (1995): David B. Busch and James R. Starling, for their research report, ‘Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature’. The citations include reports of, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweller’s saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a beer glass; and one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.
• Chemistry (1998): Jacques Benveniste, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.
• Physics (2000): Andre Geim and Michael Berry, for using magnets to levitate a frog. Geim later shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on graphene, the first time anyone has been awarded both the Ig Nobel and (real) Nobel Prizes.
• Physics (2001): David Schmidt, for his partial explanation of the shower-curtain effect: a shower curtain tends to billow inwards while a shower is being taken.
• Biology (2003): C.W. Moeliker, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
• Economics (2005): Gauri Nanda, for inventing Clocky, an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.
• Mathematics (2006): Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes, for calculating the number of photographs that must be taken to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.
• Medicine (2010): Simon Rietveld, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride.

Now say for yourself: surely it’s any academics dream to receive an Ig Nobel Prize one day? Therefore we from Fred and Fred are already hard at work for next year’s edition. Just imagine the possibilities…

• Cosmology (2012): Fred and Fred, for proving the possibility that parallel universes exist in which even numbers cannot be divided by 2.
• Linguistics (2012): Fred and Fred, for their study ‘Fly, Feel and Fall’, a list of 1,000 words which become very funny when pronounced with a Japanese accent (which turns every f into an h and every l into an r).
• Marketing (2012): Fred and Fred, for definitively disproving that cleaning products which feature animals (ducks, frogs, bears, etcetera) clean better than those which do not.
• Philosophy (2012): Fred and Fred, for (the title of) their paper ‘Does Existentialism Really Exist?’.
• Sports Science (2012): Fred and Fred, for discovering the constant h, representing the relation between the size of the ball and the size of the hole (basketball, snooker, golf, …).
• Medicine (2012): Fred and Fred, for their decennia-long research ‘Is it really impossible to lick your own elbow?’.
• Communication (2012): Fred and Fred, for talking for a whole night about the infinite monkey theorem, which states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Fingers crossed!

Quarky behaviour

Let's be honest, if this isn't our first blogpost you are reading, the word 'nerd' must already have crossed your mind. On several occasions, I guess. Not that either one of the Freds considers this to be an insult. As a matter of fact, 'writings having a touch of nerdiness' was more or less what we had in mind when we came up with the idea to start a blog. Right from the beginning.

But does anyone know what a nerd really is? My dictionary says: an unstylish, unattractive or socially inept person, slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits. I cannot speak for myself, but I can definitely say that the other Fred does not qualify as a genuine nerd if this is the definition. Don't get me wrong, he enjoys intellectual and academic pursuits, but that's it.

The thing with definitions is that they are like wedding shoes' laces: way too rigid to be useful. It might be easier to think of a list of easy questions which may help you to determine your degree of nerdiness.

Who is your idol?

Now this would definitely be my giveaway. Albert Einstein. I do have a back-up answer, every once in a while it's just easier to say Mike Patton, but my idol is a physicist. I read more books on Einstein than an average family can handle in a lifetime, I sign my emails with one of his quotes and I have at least one ex-girlfriend who will happily admit she fell in love with me the day I (successfully) explained to her what the special theory of relativity exactly says.

Why am I sharing this? Well, I guess you all saw the news this week. An international team of scientists said on Thursday they have recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light. Neutrinos, to be more precise, arriving 60 nanoseconds earlier than predicted. A nanosecond, people, that is one billionth of a second. Compared to this unit of time, a blink of an eye takes ages. And yet, according to connoisseurs, this is a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Just in case you feel this burning desire to send Fred (or Fred) an email, with the question 'How do you feel about this discovery, that could imply that Einstein was wrong?', here's an answer: this will not affect my adoration. Fred makes mistakes too. Usually having effects lasting a wee bit longer.

Too bad they focused on neutrinos by the way. I would have loved to see my train arrive a few nanoseconds earlier than expected. Although I am not sure I would have noticed, I'd probably be blinking my eyes...

Pod-heads (2)

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Why is it, that guessing exactly when a certain event took place in the past is so hard to do? I'm pretty sure that a majority of the people didn't realize, until this week - unless Planet Media's news rays couldn't penetrate the thick layer of clouds around your head - that 9/11 happened already 10 years ago. I heard some people say it felt like it happened only yesterday, whereas others dated it back more than a decade ago.

Does this mean that people tend to forget the answers to what will ultimately become obvious pub quiz questions, or merely that Time itself behaves in strange ways - resolutely trying to prevent its very Soul from being captured by mundane concepts such as seconds, days and years?

I don't know the answer to the questions above - I can't even remember when I started thinking about them - but I do know that there are things defying both the (lack of) power of our brain and the somehow unpredictable grip of time on our lives.

Timeless things.

Like music.

I guess we all have our own list of classics, don't we? The kind of tracks we can keep listening to, never getting bored with them. Our best friends in the record collection, with whom we share moments, good and bad. Songs that make us close our eyes and realize that sometimes it doesn't matter that we don't know when things happened.

Only that they happened...

... that's the question!

In a recent article in the newspaper, I read that some people tend to believe that dolphins have quite a good notion about the meaning of 'death'. They are not the only animals showing emotions when a member of their group dies - elephants, chimps and gorilla's can also exhibit behaviour which looks like mourning - but apparently the reaction of dolphins is rather profound. At least that's what Joan Gonzalvo, a dolphin specialist working in a research institute in Milano, claims.

Somehow, this article made me think of something I have read a few years ago: together with human beings, dolphins are the only creatures that can have sex for pleasure. Now this raises at least a few questions. First of all, and most obviously: is it true? As a matter of fait divers, I couldn't care less. The answer is either yes or no. Black or white. Heads or tails.

What I find more interesting is the following question: who conjectured this, and why? Seriously, being an academic myself, I am no stranger to coming up with silly questions - or what seems like a silly question to the outer world. Has Mongolia ever won the Paralympics, for example? But the thing is that my own curiosity is usually triggered by something. Inspiration doesn't come for free - especially not when, as is often the case, it is to be found in a glass of alchol. So this leads me right back to the aforementioned question: who came up with the idea that dolphins might be the only animals having sex for pleasure, and why?

Either the Fish Porn Departement does not only have an extensive selection of cod mating classics (this is what comedians describe as a call-back) but also caters for dolphin lovers ('Flipper and the Blowhole', anyone?), or this person was engaged in sexual intercourse with a Delphinidae family member and got compliments afterwards. Which is not some sick twist of my mind, by the way. Check the following page in case that crossed yours...

The most interesting question however, is the following: how do you (dis)prove that claim? Think about it: how can you verify whether dolphins really are the only animals enjoying the act of procreation? There's only one way to do that, right? Testing all other animals.

Which, in a moment of pure insight, lead me to the obvious answer to questions 2 and 3.

The only guy that could have concluded this, was Noah.

Yups, Noah from the Bible story.

The one about his Ark.

Or, as I would call it, his Love Boat...

2011: a space oddity

Pizza marketing wars have now officially reached a point of cosmic proportions - pardon me the pun - as Domino's Japanese branch announced its plans to open the first pizza restaurant on the moon. Just in case you have some weird synonym in mind the existence of which I am not aware of, we are talking about the celestial body rotating our planet. The moon, as we say.

It all started in 2001, when the enemies from Pizza Hut delivered a pizza to astronauts orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station (ISS). Not just any pizza of course: the creation of the world's first pizza in outer space was the product of an intense - and, let me guess, rather expensive - collaboration between Pizza Hut and Russian food scientists. A quote from the official report: "before final certification for consumption was given, the vacuum-sealed Pizza Hut pizza had to undergo rigorous stabilized thermal conditions to determine freshness-stay and life span." Sounds like someone lost the first 3496 pages of the Priority List for Global Problems Humanity is Facing.

You might still remember Domino's first counterblow, from December 2010, when they announced their plan to pay the winner of a contest ¥2.5 million (more or less €​23000) for one lousy hour of delivering pizza's. One small job for man, one giant leap for his paycheck.

Today it seems that this was only the first step towards pizza craziness: Tomohide Matsunaga, a spokesman for Domino's, revealed the company's ambition to build a pizza dome on our only natural satellite because they anticipate there will be many people living on the moon: astronauts who are working there, wealthy Dutch tourists and migrant workers distributing pizza flyers. The company added they even expect to be able to offer delivery services. Which kept me wondering to where exactly that would be? Because unless Russian scooter scientists are working on a new kind of vehicle, I wouldn't expect the delivery to be made within half an hour...

In retrospect, I regret not being a part of the Domino think-tank, as I did have a few more bright ideas for the future. Or would you call an ice-cream parlor in the Sahara, a vending machine selling short black hairpieces in China or a night shop in Pakistan a bit too far-fetched?

Meteo sensitive

When I was younger (sit down, grandpa Fred will tell you a story), I didn’t mind bad weather at all. In fact, the worse, the better as far as I was concerned. I used to love riding my bike through the pouring rain and I took secret pleasure in arriving at school with numb fingers and a drunkard’s nose on a freezing morning. Yes, I even loved those dark, overcast and rainy days of late Summer which we are currently experiencing. It might have had something to do with being a gloomy teenager, but it was all fine by me…

Nowadays bad weather really gets my spirits down and good weather definitely cheers me up. So I’m either turning into a normal person, or I’m getting more meteo sensitive, as they say, depending on how you look at it. In any case, this recent change has also renewed my attention in the daily weather forecast. Like many people, every evening I anxiously await the end of the TV news to hear what the weather man/lady has to say. Will it rain cats and dogs tomorrow? Will we have a ray of sunlight over the weekend? Any danger of late frosts? (I wasn’t kidding about grandpa Fred, you see).

But yesterday I began thinking about how strange it really is to have a weather forecast in the news. Just think about it. The first part isn’t news at all. “Today we saw heavy rain all day”, no shit, Sherlock! We have seen what the weather was like, thank you, we do not need you repeating it for us. And the second part, the actual forecast, shouldn’t be in a news program, should it? Indeed, a weather forecast is little more than an educated guess; and lately they have been wrong more often than right. So what legitimate place does educated guessing have in a news program, which should be about facts?

Imagine we would do the same with the news! Go on, suppose for a minute we had a news forecast as well as a weather forecast at the end of every news report. Can you imagine the anchor going:

And finally, the news forecast… Tomorrow might well be the day Kaddafi is captured or killed by the Libyan freedom fighters. It’s got to happen one of these days. Even before noon there is a good chance some politician in the north will have gravely insulted a colleague in the south, or vice versa. And by late afternoon there will definitely be someone who has won the day’s stage in the Vuelta. Tonight will probably be fairly uneventful, unless we are invaded by aliens or something, but that doesn’t seem likely. The rest of the week could be important, or not - frankly, it’s too early to tell. Of course, there’s always the off-chance the pope might die. See you tomorrow for more news!

That wouldn’t do at all, would it?

What can I do?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few weeks or do not own a TV set, you’ve seen it. I allude to that sepia-toned movie clip in which 1212 (official name: Belgisch Consortium voor Noodhulpsituaties) asks the Belgian people for donations to battle the current famine in Somalia and the Horn of Africa. Children with white tubes up their nose, sinewy hands groping for food, shoulder blades protruding from backs like the wings on a drowning butterfly. You’ve seen it.

But have you really seen it? I mean, have you actually watched it from start to finish? I haven’t. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I guess it’s normal. It hurts to watch this kind of thing with honest eyes, and besides, these movie clips are designed to make you tear up and feel guilty. But while their hard colours and that sad piano in the background might be orchestrated by a clever director, the message that goes out from such a movie clip is nothing if not real. In fact, its moral appeal can be quite a shock. Here you are in your couch, perhaps enjoying a glass of wine or even a snack, and suddenly you realise that the lives of 12 million people are threatened by drought. That should keep you from complaining about the Belgian summer for a while…

Now this moral appeal has always fascinated me. I consider it one of the most beautiful (tragic, but beautiful) human emotions. Seeing the face of the other and understanding its appeal as something that transcends us, sharply defines our own existence. The words are not mine, but are the metaphors used by Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), whose whole philosophy consists of an ethics of the other. But besides fascinating, the feeling of a moral appeal is at the same time extremely bothersome. If you really attend to it, it bugs you, it gnaws at you, and it questions your actions. And almost inevitably the crushing weight of responsibility you feel, will prompt the age-old question: “What can I do?”. And indeed, I don’t mean to be cynical, but ask yourself honestly: What can I do about the 2011 famine in the East of Africa?

I’ll tell you what I did. I donated 100 Euros to 1212.

But I didn’t feel better for it. Not in the least. Even now when I type it, it seems so easy and so little. One hundred Euros, what difference does that make? Another cynical question.

So I started honestly thinking the matter over. Seriously, what can I do?

• Could I perhaps give more? Two hundred Euros? Five hundred? A thousand? Would I really miss that money? But money cannot be a miracle cure, can it?
• Should I try to do something more substantial? Like supporting Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders every month? But I already do, and surely I need to do something more than the usual this time…
  
• Should I try to raise awareness? Like writing letters to the European Union or blogging about the problem? But I’m doing just that, and I can’t say I feel tons better now. Besides, what an armchair-solution to famine is that?

The more I think of it, the guiltier I feel. Only actually packing my stuff and going to Somalia to help could probably make me feel truly helpful. (And even then, how much good could a professional Latinist do in a refugee camp?) Otherwise, I doubt if I will ever be able to look at those images of starving people and feel I am doing enough…

And then it hit me. What’s the real problem here? The famine in Somalia? Or the fact that I will always feel frustrated, no matter what I do, that injustice and poverty still exist?

That’s right…

So, what can we do? That’s for everyone to decide for himself/herself. But whatever we do, we shouldn’t expect to feel any better about human misery because of what we do to fight it. In fact, I’m glad it never gets any better to watch those images of dying children. So, please do what you can for Africa and 1212. (The press recently pointed out that Belgium is preposterously behind other countries in this matter.) And if you want a clean conscience: do not give because you need to. Give because someone else needs it. Badly.

(Donations for the Horn of Africa can be made through BE 19 0000 0000 1212. Click here for more information.)