Weekly Wonder

We post wondrous things on a weekly basis.

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Unsinkable Sam the cat

This week’s famous animal individual is Unsinkable Sam, who may have served as ship’s cat for both the German and British navies during World War II and who may have also been named Oskar, and may or may not have actually been several cats or no cats at all. 

(image source)

Unsinkable Sam’s first post was on the German battleship Bismarck, which was sunk during a battle on 27 May 1941. He survived and was rescued by the British HMS Cossack. On 24 October 1941, the Cossack was torpedoed by a German U-boat and eventually sank. Sam/Oskar also survived this event, and was subsequently transferred to the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. On 14 November 1941, the Ark Royal was also torpedoed and slowly sank. Our cat friend was rescued by  HMS Lightening (which would eventually sink in 1943). 

After the Ark Royal, ol’ Sam/Oskar was grounded from marine duty and was transferred to become an office cat for the Governor of Gibraltar instead. Eventually he was sent to the UK and lived out the remainder of his life with a seaman. It is not entirely clear how much of Unsinkable Sam’s history really happened and how much of it was composed of the tall tales that sea folk so enjoy. Pictures claiming to depict Sam don’t always show the same cat. That said, one must remember that an awful lot of ships sank during the war regardless, since it was a war, and no cats can be held responsible for foolish human actions.

-Sunny C.

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Update: Hiatus

I, Christian H, am now officially on hiatus, except to facilitate other contributors who may appear here. I do not know when, or in what capacity, I shall return, but almost certainly I shall return. In the meantime, I have a new blog. It is... neither as active nor as fancy as I had hoped it would be. Peace be with you.

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Lava Lake

This week’s geological phenomenon is the lava lake. 

Image source: U.S. Geological Survey on Flickr.

These are large amounts of molten lava pooled in one area, usually a volcanic vent, crater, or broad depression; when the lava is solidified, they are often called frozen lava lakes. The lava in these formations is usually basaltic, but not always. Assorted forces in the lava, to do with columns of bubbles and the movement of heat, mean that lava lakes may recirculate in a steady-state or it might periodically rise and fall.

These are rare phenomena, occurring in only a few places in the world: Erta Ale in Ethopia, Ambrym in Vanuatu, Mount Erebus on Ross Island in Antarctica, Kīlauea on Big Island in Hawaii, and Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kīlauea has two persistent lava lakes, which is very rare; the one at Nyiragongo is the largest ever recorded at 700 metres wide in 1982. Temporary ones form from time to time.

Posted by Christian H.

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Minotaur

This week’s fantastic being is the minotaur. 

Image source: scsmith4 on Flickr.

Of the typical myth surrounding this being, Borges wrote the following: 

The idea of a house built so that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than that of a man with a bull’s head, but both ideas go well together and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur. It is equally fitting that in the centre of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant. 

The Minotaur was born in unusual circumstances. Minos ascended to the throne of Crete but had many competitors to the title, so he prayed to Poseidon for protection; Poseidon sent him as a snow-white bull—the Bull of Crete—as a sign; Minos was to sacrifice the bull, but he kept it because of its beauty. Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife Pasiphaë fall in love with the bull. She had Daedalus, a craftsmen, make a hollow wooden cow so she could consummate that love from inside it. The Minotaur was the resulting child. Unfortunately, as an unnatural monster, the Minotaur needed human flesh for nourishment; Minos had Daedalus construct a labyrinth to contain the Minotaur, and fed it with beautiful young men and women until the hero Theseus slew it.

The Minotaur was, possibly, a symbol of the political relations between Crete and Greece, when Crete worshiped a sun god depicted as a bull. In the 1930s, surrealist artists used the labyrinth and the Minotaur as a symbol of the subconscious and the artistic pursuit to explore it, though Picasso’s particular use of the figure may have drawn on Spanish bullfighting, too. For centuries, the Minotaur has been shown as a single being with a single biography; the advent of fantasy fiction and gaming has made of the creature an entire species.

Posted by Christian H.

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Baobab

This week’s plant is the baobab. 

Image source: Haïle Qui on Flickr.

Also known as Adansonia digitata, the dead-rat tree, the monkey-bread tree, the upside-down tree, and the cream of tartar tree, the baobab is a deciduous tree widespread in Africa, especially in the savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa. (Deciduous in this case means it loses its leaves in the dry season; specifically, the baobab loses its leaves for nine months of the year. The bare branches look like roots, hence the common name “upside-down tree.”) They have thick, bottle-shaped trunks that can be 10-14 metres across, and grow to heights between 5 and 25 metres. The bark can feel like cork, but the trunk is nonetheless smooth and shiny with reddish brown or grey colouring. Its branches are thick and stout and it has large white flowers that open at night. The flowers are pendulous with what appears to be a pom-pom on the bottom; it stinks like carrion. The fruit is filled with a pulp that dries over time, hardening and then falling to pieces. The pieces look like chunks of powdery bread—both the monkey-bread tree and dead-rat tree names refer to this fruit.

The fruit is nutritious and the leaves can also be eaten. The Wikipedia page has a number of interesting legends about the tree. There is a particular baobab known as Sunland Baobab, Big Baobab, and Pub Tree in South Africa which is about 1060 years old; in its hollowed trunk the Sunland Farm’s owners have built a bar and a wine cellar, and it is now a tourist attraction.

Posted by Christian H.

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Natural Selection

This week’s idea is natural selection. 

Image source: Steven Bedard on Flickr. The bird is one of Darwin’s finches.

(I had originally scheduled it for the closest Tuesday to Darwin’s birthday, but at the last minute I remembered the Tree of Life and preferred to talk about abolitionism.) The term contrasts with artificial selection, what we now think of as selective breeding. Thus as artificial selection gradually changes a population’s biological traits through successive generations because humans decide which animals (or plants, etc.) can reproduce, so natural selection does the same, but without intentional human help.

Natural selection is not the process by which organisms in a population are different from one another; that happens mostly through mutation. Organisms with particular variations tend to survive longer and therefore reproduce more than other organisms; if the variation is heritable, then more of the next generation will have that variation than other variations. Over time, the species may specialize for new environmental changes, or certain populations may even become a new species. Along with sexual selection (in which variations that help organisms pursue and achieve reproduction are more likely to persist) and fecundity selection (in which variations that help organisms produce a greater number of viable offspring are more likely to persist), natural selection is one of the main drivers of evolution. Taxonomy, Mendelian genetics, and molecular genetics, Darwinian evolution combine to become what is called the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Posted by Christian H.

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Torvosaurus

This week’s prehistoric animal is the torvosaurus. 

Image source: Tojosan on Flickr.

It was a theropod dinosaur, specifically a megalosaurid—related to spinosaurs—living in the region from Colorado to Portugal during the Jurassic Period. The Torvosaurus genus contains two species: T. tanneri and T. gurneyi. T. tanneri was a large and heavily built dinosaur that grew to about 10 metres (32.8’) long, making it one of the largest carnivores of its time, along with Allosaurus. Should you wish to travel back to the Jurassic and acquire one as a pet, you should know that a torvosaurus could weigh 4 – 5 tonnes. It had a long, narrow snout.

It has a few other names: Edmarka rex is probably T. tanneri, and Brontoraptor is a sort of nickname. Torvosaurus means “savage lizard”; I can’t come up with commentary sarcastic enough for that name. T. tanneri is named for Nathan Eldon Tanner, the first counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints and an important figure to the collectors at Brighma Young University, who discovered the Torvosaurus genus; T. gurneyi is named for James Gurney, a paleoartist, the creator of the Dinotopia books, and surely among the humans most deserving of having a dinosaur named in his honour.

Posted by Christian  H.

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Saucisse the dachshund

This week’s famous animal individual is Saucisse the dog, a dachshund born and raised in France who has a double claim to fame: he was both the star of his own detective novels as well as a candidate in the 2001 mayoral elections of the town of Marseille.

(image source)

Saucisse had a sad beginning. He was found in the garbage as a puppy and rescued by the Société protectrice des animaux. After waiting for his forever home for eight months, he was adopted by the writer Serge Scotto, who worked for L'Écailler du Sud, a Marseille publishing house for detective novels. Saucisse became their mascot and was written into many of their novels. He became so famous across Marseille that a city square was inaugurated and named after him (Place du Chien Saucisse). 

He gained further fame for his candidacy during the 2001 municipal elections, with the slogan "For a more human sauciété" (a sausage pun on “society” and his name). He came in sixth with 4.5% of the votes. Saucisse was obviously very popular amongst the French folk, and his owner Scotto used his celebrity status to bring light to injustices in the country. In 2009, Saucisse also starred as a housemate for a reality show called Secret Story (the French version of Big Brother) and all the money he won on it was donated to Société protectrice des animaux. He lived to the ripe old age of 16 years. 

-Sunny C.

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Update

Some housekeeping: 1. I am going on hiatus starting at the end of the month. I do not know how long I will be on hiatus, or what sort of updating schedule I’ll keep when I return, or what categories I’ll keep/begin. That said, there should still be some activity from other contributors at least for a while: I have some confirmation that you’ll see a few new names pop up here in the coming weeks. 2. I am noticing that the images seem to be distorted in most or all of my posts, including archived ones that were not distorted before. I do not know why this is, so I’m not likely to be able to fix it until I figure out what the problem is. Christian H.

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Fumarole

This week’s geological phenomenon is the fumarole.

Image source: Chrissie on Flickr.

Fumaroles are openings in the Earth’s crust which emit steam—created when superheated water’s pressure drops when it reaches the surface—and gases, especially carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen sulfide. They typically appear near volcanoes, arranged along cracks and fissures, or in clusters or fields, or on the surface of lava flows. You could imagine a fumarole as a hot spring in which all of the water boils off before it reaches the surface. Fumaroles may persist for hundreds of years if they have a stable source, or they may appear and disappear quickly as a lava flow emerges and then cools.

A solfatara is a fumarole that releases sulfurous gases. You might hear fumaroles called steam vents (source). They may hiss or whistle as the steam escapes.

Posted by Christian H.

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This week’s fantastic being is the sphinx.

Image source: Shannon Baddie on Flickr.

In its Greek incarnation, the sphinx had the body of a human, the wings of a great bird—I often hear “eagle”—and a woman’s face; sometimes she had a snake-headed tail. Usually...

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I read it on the Wikipedia page, to be honest, and I now see I maybe <i>misread</i> the Wikipedia page no less, though if by associating pharaohs with sphinxes the pharaohs become associated with Sekhmet, it stands to reason that sphinxes are therefore also associated with Sekhmet since they are the middle term. At the very least sphinxes must be associated with the pharaoh’s association with Sekhmet. The citation practices at Wikipedia are a bit lax, but it seems that most or all of the information it has on Egyptian sphinxes comes from this book: Regier, Willis Goth. Book of the Sphinx (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). On the topic of lax citation practices, thanks for asking this question; I had forgotten to link to the source in the first sentence, which is the practice I’ve been using for this Tumblr. Posted by Christian H.

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Sphinx

This week’s fantastic being is the sphinx. 

Image source: Shannon Baddie on Flickr.

In its Greek incarnation, the sphinx had the body of a human, the wings of a great bird—I often hear “eagle”—and a woman’s face; sometimes she had a snake-headed tail. Usually the sphinx demands passers-by answer a riddle and, if they cannot, the sphinx kills and eats the person. While the Greek sphinx is a single female creature—we discussed the Greeks and their problem with women, right?—the Egyptian sphinx is usually shown with a man’s face. Furthermore, the Egyptian sphinx is ordinarily a benevolent though strong and fierce guardian. Egyptian sphinxes had some sort of relationship with Sekhmet, a lioness-headed solar goddess associated with war. Egyptians also produced ram-headed and falcon-headed sphinxes, which the Greeks called Criosphinxes and Hieracosphinxes.

Sphinxes appear through the world, either through coincidence or the trade of legends along with goods; as with goods, the legends are sometimes put to different use in different contexts. For instance, in the Philippines, the sphinx, under the name nicolonia, will ask riddles of wanderers; those who do not answer correctly it carries away and offered to the god Gev’ra of the Mayon Volcano to appease his anger. In Burma, the manussiha appears on Buddhist stupas; legends says that Buddhist monks created it to protect a new-born royal who an ogress wanted to devour. And in the meantime, European art has revived them, in both the early modern period and the Mannerism of the 15th century, where these “French sphinxes” had perfectly coiffed hair, a young woman’s breasts, pearl earrings, and a naturalistic lionness’s body. Late Baroque, Romantic, Symbolist, and Masonic artists and architects were also captured by the creature.

Posted by Christian H.

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Bladderwort

This week’s plant is the bladderwort. 

Image source: Eleanor on Flickr.

Carnivorous plants in the genus Utricularia, bladderworts live in fresh water and wet soil on every continent but Antarctica. Their flowers are the only part of the plant that that clear the soil or the surface of the water; they appear something like orchids or snapdragons, and vary in colour depending on the species, though virtually all colours are represented by some bladderwort species’ flowers.

Bladderworts, as I said, are carnivorous; they trap insects with sophisticated vacuum-driven bladders. In aquatic species, the bladders are simply underwater; in terrestrial species, the they are kept beneath the water levels of waterlogged soil. These bean-shaped structures have thin, transparent, but inflexible walls and a circular mouth with a flap. That flap is hinged and assorted structures around the mouth help create a perfect seal when the trap closes, and it is closed almost all of the time. The bladder itself pumps out any water inside the trap with osmosis; the bladder’s walls are sucked inward by the partial vacuum which the pumping creates. This creates a delicate balance: the whole structure exerts pressure to reassume its shape, while the pumping mechanism creates the vacuum that sucks the walls in. This equilibrium is so fine that it can be upset by the slightest touch to bristles acting as levers and extending around the bladder’s mouth. As soon as something—say, an insect—touches a bristle, the bladder pops out again, the flap over the mouth is opened, and the vacuum inside the bladder sucks in a column of water, usually containing the offending insect. When the bladder is filled again, the door shuts and seals, and the bladder begins pumping water out once more, but now the insect is trapped inside. If the prey is too large and still sticks out the door, the pumping action is still enough to draw the whole body in as it is digested, so long as the prey’s head is not too big to get through the bladder’s mouth. 

Image source: Boaz Ng on Flickr.

Most aquatic bladderworts are free-floating; a few grow on the rocks of rapid streams and waterfalls. They are capable of growing in both acidic and alkaline water, but prefer the former as there is less competition. In cold temperate zones, they grow turions, a specialized bud; almost all of the plant will die and rot away during the winter, but the turion will detach and sink, growing into a full plant again in spring.

Posted by Christian H.

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The Other

This week’s idea is the Other. Sometimes written with a lowercase initial—the other—or as the Constitutive Other, the Other began as a mostly psychological concept but has gained significant influence in cultural and political theory as well. I can’t possibly do the idea justice in this short space, but in general you can imagine it as the opposite of the Same or the self. 

Image source: gtpete63 on Flickr. I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what images I was going to use for this post. Any person who is Other to me is not necessarily going to be Other to people unlike me. I’ve therefore chosen two images so that at least one of the subjects will be Other to you in at least some way. Of course, Otherness is not merely demographic but also an artifact of cultural construction; in a patriarchal culture, for instance, men are not Other to women as women are Other to men. I also preferred images in which the subject looks directly at the camera to heighten the sense of demand; however, it occurs to me as I write this that to certain neuroatypical people these images will not have the same punch as they have to me.

In psychoanalytical use, the Other is what’s necessary to create the Self: in order for a person to imagine themselves as something, they need to have something with which to contrast themselves. That something is the Other. But it’s important to think of this in terms of groups and not just individuals. Everyone within a group is part of the Same, at least as far as the group goes; people outside the group, people who are different, are part of the Other. Although it is not inevitable that people mistreat those they consider to be Other, it is very very common. European imperialism was justified by othering (designating as Other and placing them outside the margins of the community) those who were not (yet) subjugated by the Empire. However, there are ethical systems that engage with the Other more positively; of these, Emmanuel Lévinas is perhaps the best known. For Lévinas, both God and other people are the Other, and the existence of the Other indicates that a moral demand existed before one arrived on the scene.

Image source: Logan Campbell on Flickr.

In contemporary North America, Otherness shows up in two places most notably: in a system where male is considered the default or neutral sex, female is thus Other; after the attacks in New York in 2001 and George Bush’s question, “Why do they hate us?,” the Middle East and/or the global population of Muslims has become the Other to the Western European-descended Christian+nonreligious world. Black men and LGTBQ folks seem like pretty good candidates, too.

Posted by Christian H.

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Plesiosaurus

This week’s prehistoric animal is the plesiosaurus. 

Image source: Biodiversity Heritage Library on Flickr.

A genus of large marine reptiles, plesiosaurus is maybe best described as a looking like a Loch Ness Monster: broad oval body, long and slender neck, small head, short tail, and four paddle-like limbs. It was an early, typical member of the Plesiosauria order. Compared to other plesiosaurs, plesiosaurus had a small and very narrow head, with nostrils appearing much nearer its eyes than the tip of its snout. From nose to tail-tip a plesiosaurus would have been about 3.5 metres (11’). It would have paddled to swim; the tail was too short to have been what propelled it. The Wikipedia page has an extensive account of its skeleton, if phrases like “fused clavicles” and “caudal vertebrae” are meaningful to you.

Plesiosaurus was one of the very early fossil finds and Victorian England was, predictably, very excited about it; they named it near lizard to indicate that it was closer to lizards they recognized than the recently-discovered Ichthyosaurus was. In its own time period, the Jurassic, plesiosauruses ate belemnites (a kind of early squid-like creature), fish, and similar aquatic prey. We do not know if plesiosauruses laid eggs on land like sea turtles or gave live birth in the water like sea snakes; frankly, the first image seems ridiculous to me but, then again, so many things seem ridiculous to me and they nonetheless happen. Either way, the young may have lived in sheltered estuaries before striking out into the deep blue.

Posted by Christian H.

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Aeolian process

This week’s meteorological/geological phenomenon is the aeolian process. 

Image source: Kuan Sun on Flickr.

This name can also be spelled eoilian or æolian, and it refers to how the wind shapes the surface of the Earth. The most obvious of these is wind erosion: the wind might deflate by removing loose particles or it might abrade by grinding rocks with those loose particles. Regions with lots of wind erosion are called deflation zones and typically have lots of desert pavement, or sheet-like rock surfaces that remain after the wind has worn everything else away. Assorted interesting rock formations—hoodoos, yardangs, ventifacts—are a result of aeolian processes carving at the rock.

Wind also moves particles and deposits them elsewhere, forming sand sheets and dunes.

Posted by Christian H.

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Cerberus

This week’s fantastic being is Cerberus. 

Image source: Strongpaper on Flickr.

A multi-headed dog or hellhound, it often had a snake for a tail, a mane of snakes, or a lion’s paws. Cerberus (KER-ber-us, if you’d like to be Greek about it) guards the mouth to the underworld of Greek mythology in order to prevent the dead from escaping or the living breaking in. Jorge Luís Borges writes of the Cerberus in The Book of Imaginary Beings: 

If Hell is a house, the house of Hades, it is natural that it have its watchdog; it is also natural that this dog be fearful.

Hesiod’s Theogony records the Cerberus as having fifty heads, and some sources gave it as many as a hundred, but “to make things easier for the plastic arts, this number has been reduced and Cerberus’ three heads are now a matter of public record.” Sometimes it is said that one head sees the past, another the present, and the last the future, or they symbolize birth, youth, and old age; either way, I would say Cerberus represents the inevitability of time and death.

Cerberus’ mother was Echidna and its father Typhon. It preferred live meat but it could be paid off with honeycombs. If you find yourself needing to break into the Underworld, you can drug the honeycombs as Aeneas did. Hercules, however, was tasked with carrying it to King Eurystheus’s throne room; he simply flung Cerberus over his back. (Many depictions of this event show Cerberus with two heads.)

Posted by Christian H.