Since 2009, Ada Lovelace Day has Aimed “to Raise The Profile Of Women In Science, Technology, Engineering

David in Singapore, Serious Moonlight Tour 1983

Photo © Denis O’Regan

Is Polygamy a Natural Impulse?

A conversation with biologist David P. Barash on the biological underpinnings of human polygamy.

How hard-wired are human beings for polygamy?

Aristotle’s Wheel Paradox. Can you figure out what the paradox is? (What doesn’t make sense?) More info at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AristotlesWheelParadox.html

Rishi coffin for a commoner

Second Intermediate Period, Dynasty 17, 1580–1550 B.C. (find spot unknown)

In Dynasty 17 a new type of coffin appeared in Thebes: anthropoid, but no longer conceived solely as an inner coffin, and resting on its back because of a change in funerary customs whereby the deceased was no longer laid on one side. The anthropoid coffin was to become the burial container of choice among royals and commoners alike. The earliest examples are decorated in paint with a feather pattern, and so they are known by the Arabic word for “feathered,” rishi. Carved from local sycamore because the Thebans no longer had access to imported cedar, all rishi coffins, royal or private, show the deceased wearing the royal nemes headdress. This example was clearly a stock item made for a commoner, for a blank space was left for the owner’s name to be inserted at the end of the vertical inscription on the lid (a conventional offering formula for the dead).

Great vulture’s wings envelop the legs and lower abdomen. Even the top of the headdress is decorated with a feather pattern so that the deceased appears as a human-headed bird according to the concept of the ba, or mobile spirit. The ba could travel to any place and transform itself into anything it desired. The face on the coffin is painted black, not to represent the unknown owner’s race but to reinforce his identification with Osiris. The flesh of the god of death and resurrection was often shown as black or green to signify the black silt that fertilized the land with each year’s Nile flood, and the new life in the form of green vegetation that it brought forth. Painted on the chest is a pectoral, or chest ornament, in the form of a vulture and cobra, symbols of Nekhbet and Wadjyt, the tutelary goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Source: Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Everyday Phenomena: The Maillard Reaction

At first glance, steak, French fries, bread, milk caramel, and soy sauce don’t have very many similarities. However, the preparation of these foods all have one thing in common: browning that occurs via the Maillard (my-YAR) reaction.

The Maillard reaction was first discovered in 1912 by Louis-Camille Maillard, and refers to a long chain of reactions that ultimately leads to browning of food. This chain typically begins with the condensation of an amine (often the amino acid lysine) with a reducing sugar (containing an aldehyde); one example of this Amadori rearrangement is shown above with lysine and glucose.

This Amadori product can react in a variety of different ways, including dehydration and deamination to produce a diverse array of molecules that give browned food a distinctive flavor; a few of these compounds are shown above. At the end of the sequence of reactions that occur during browning is a class of polymeric compounds known as melanoidins, which lend a brown color to the food.

Below about 140°C (280°F), the Maillard reaction does not proceed at an appreciable rate, although alkaline conditions (such as the lye used to make pretzels) can accelerate the process. Without this reaction, many foods we enjoy now wouldn’t be nearly as tasty!

Further Reading: Hodge, J. E., J. Agric. Food Chem. 1953, 1 (15), 928-943 (Full text)

Laplace transform table. Source. (I’m obsessed. <3 And figured y’all would like this one, too!)

Chai Tea

Word for tea in most of the world’s languages are all ultimately related, belonging to two groups of terms.

“Tea” itself belongs to one of those groups.  It was a borrowing from Dutch thee, in turn from tê, the reading of  茶 in the Amoy dialect of Min Nan.  Those languages whose introduction to tea was primaraly from Dutch traders typically use words likewise derived via the Dutch thee.  The Polish herbata is also part of this family, though slightly obscured, being a borrowing from the Latin herba thea.

The other major group is represented by the word chai, a more recent borrowing in English.  Chai was borrowed from the Hindi cāy, which in turn came from a Chinese dialect with a form similar to Mandarin chá.  Languages that use chai-type terms generally were first introduced to tea through overland trade, ultimately to northern China, while those that use tea-type terms were generally introduced to it via sea trade, from Southern China.

Both tê and chá are derived from the same Middle Chinese form, ultimately derived from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *s-la “leaf”.

Liu Chuyu was the first-born daughter of Emperor Xiaowu and his empress, during the Liu Song dynasty. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Lasting just 60 years in the 400s CE, it was one of the four southern kingdoms which succeeded the Eastern Jin Empire. While it was going, the Liu Song dynasty ruled most of southern China, but a string of incompetent or tyrannical emperors led to internal instability and the dynasty’s quick downfall.

Luckily for her, Liu Chuyu was born during a relatively stable period. Her father became Emperor Xiaowu by force, but his reign was more or less stable, and he died of natural causes when she was 17 or 18. The transition of power was bloodless and his son, Liu Chuyu’s younger brother, followed Emperor Xiaowu upon the throne.

Before he died, her father married her to He Ji, son of a prominent official. Liu Chuyu doesn’t seem to have been so happy about this. History records that when her brother left the palace she would often go to see him. One of those visits, Liu Chuyu said to him “While our genders are different, we are born of the same father. However, you have more than 10,000 women in your palaces, and I only have one husband, and this is unfair.” In response, her younger brother selected 30 young handsome men for her to keep. (Doesn’t it sound weird when put like that?) Liu Chuyu … enjoyed… them for a year before her brother was assassinated. Her uncle took the throne, denounced Liu Chuyu for her immorality, and ordered her to commit suicide. No more male harems for princesses.

No. 2 Construction Battalion

Fighting for a country that didn’t want them.

On March 25 1917, Canada’s first and only black military unit left Halifax harbor for the Western Front. Six hundred soldiers, mostly from Nova Scotia, formed up as No. 2 Construction Battalion. Many had been trying to enlist since 1914,  but winning this privilege had been an up-hill fight: for two years military authorities had turned down black recruits, telling them “This is a white man’s war.”

Finally, in 1916, Canada allowed black recruits entry into a segregated united of laborers. An additional 165 African-Americans crossed the border to join them, creating a full complement of 600 men. Winning the struggle to join up hardly ended discrimination. Except for the reverend, all officers were white, and even when they went to board their transport ship on March 25 the captain initially refused to let them on, saying that he would not let them travel on the same vessel as white soldiers.

The recruits hoped to be allowed to fight when they reached France, but instead the Canadian Expediotnary Force immediately downgraded them from a battalion to a company and assigned them to fell trees and prepare positions for white soldiers. They were not ever even issued with rifles. Their work was tedious and demoralizing, and many considered themselves failures even as they suffered casualties from artillery shells and poison gas.

The unit returned to Canada in 1919, but received no fanfare upon arrival. Much like America’s black soldiers, they returned to a country that did not value them or their sacrifice and actively oppressed their rights. Most of these veterans returned to poverty and unemployment. When they finally had their first reunion in 1982, only nine could attend from twenty known survivors. Their legacy and sacrifice has been revived since then. Although very few men were allowed the chance to serve, they began the first crack in the Canadian military’s institutionalized racism.

NCLEX Pharmacology Medical Suffixes

-amil = calcium channel blockers

-caine = local anesthetics

-dine = anti-ulcer agents (H2 histamine blockers)

-done = opioid analgesics

-ide = oral hypoglycemics

-lam = anti-anxiety agents

-oxacin = broad spectrum antibiotics

-micin = antibiotics

-mide = diuretics

-mycin = antibiotics

-nuim = neuromuscular blockers

-olol = beta blockers

-pam = anti-anxiety agents

-pine = calcium channel blockers

-pril = ace inhibitors

-sone = steroids

-statin =antihyperlipidemics

-vir = anti-virais

-zide = diuretics