Shadow board

Obsessive? Perhaps. But it's worth all the trouble with the pegboard and the paint to have everything sorted, and know exactly where everything is so you can lay your hand on it right when you want it.

If only the family would learn to put things back in the right place after using them.

Wandering wombs

I remain steadfast in my conviction that there is a great deal of money to be made from the combination of Zorbing and Rebirthing therapy. It only remains to eliminate the problem of atomic agitation and interchange ensuing from the repeated impacts between the occupant and the interior of the zorb.

Human Centipede Blogging -- Nigerian Furniture edition

Just the thing for future Republican Conference chair-related psychodramas!

Blurry photographs, but the battery was failing on the camera. Rather than arse around trying for better images, in my naivete I assumed that the Ethnological Museum would have a halfway decent website where I could find better images at leisure.

Get your own pervy fertility-throne photographs, moochers.
Also too:

Turtle Haze

1. Russell's Second Conjecture, that "It's turtles all the way down", has only been demonstrated for the first 10⁷ turtles. It has been shown to be mathematically equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis, so if a tortoise or terrapin is found, the corollary follows that there must be a corresponding non-trivial zero of the Zeta Function with a real part ≠ ½.
Both conjectures are equivalent to Dunsany's Recursive Theology, which states that it's chess-playing gods all the way up.

2. It is estimated that at least 750 softball games around the world are disrupted  each year by leatherback turtles.

3. Turtles are clockwork entities, devised by James Blaylock as part of the backstory of The Digging Leviathan, only to be released into the environment when anti-steampunk extremists broke into his laboratory.

4. Hoan Kiem Lake in in the middle of Hanoi contains a giant softback turtle of uncertain species, recently captured with the help of the Vietnamese military who are better-trained in chelonian wrangling than any other military organisation of comparable size. It may be the last of its species. The mummified turtle kept in a shrine on Jade Island (after dying in a crowbar-related episode in 1967) was probably its mate. One day REAL SOON NOW the one in the lake will notice its bereavement and wreak a bloodthirsty vengeance. Someone should write a book.

5. Speaking of books, Mock Turtle sounds interesting and I have asked the Library Pixies to interloan a copy from the Pseudobiblic Archives.

6. Authorities do not recommend spending long periods in an aquarium gazing meditatively into a tank cultivating a mental bond with its strange slow inhabitants. Eventually there will be a transferal of consciousness and you will find yourself inside the tank staring out at your body as it exits the aquarium. This always happens. This is all very well for axolotls with their Aztec profiles, or for alien species, but it's not so much fun when you're a stomatopod.

Also you may find that you are a character in a Russell Hoban novel. Not that there's anything wrong with that (especially since Russell Hoban himself was only a character in a Dorothy Sayers novel).

Strike Lock-out of Riddled editorial cartoonists continues into third week

A commenter at Balloon Juice describes the Romney side of US presidential campaigning, in terms that call out for an illustration:

The general “campaign gone off the rails, through a housing development, and over a cliff” feel of the thing?

It is totally not "scab labour" when you ride back in the time machine and commission work from Windsor McKay.

Cursed (or blessed) with an encyclopedic knowledge of ANALOG cover art from the 1970s

"an excuse to post Minotaur hentai", said Cerberus at the Sadly,Nocracy.

yes, I'm going to take this as a request.

Fire of unknown origin

Good news for the owners of ruly beards! There is a sudden fad in the world of Science for investigating facial hair -- preferably one's own -- as protection against UV radiation.*

Does this inspire the Riddled Research Laboratory to examine the efficacy of beards as protection against spontaneous human combustion and fire-starting pyrokinetics? Why yes, it evidently does, for values of "inspire" that include "giving tigris an excuse to poke AK and I with a stick until we make something up."

As shown here, the rate of a-cappella-singing-related spontaneous combustion among unbearded volunteers subjects is as high as 50%.** Conversely, the number of luxuriantly-bearded Riddled bloggers who have succumbed in this way is statistically indistinguishable from 0.

Beards are also known to have protective value against cats, mediums, and unwanted sexual attentions from nubile ladies... but not against chickens.

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* Beardart from 50 Watts.
** Insert own joke about barber-shop quartets.

UPDATE: Anyone making up limericks involving 'pursuit', 'hirsute' and 'fur-suit' will incur a summary banning.

UPDATE² (for tigris): 
Here's an image from the control experiment, in which an unbearded mannequin is exposed to anti-UV light from an anti-source.

The Wonder of the Tundra #2 -- On the Permafrost

Eye-colour-based discrimination has a long and lamentable history in the US, but we thought that people had finally moved on to a general acceptance of equality. So it is SHOCKING to see a pair of Australian academics rarking up the old hatreds and prejudices. It is yet another sign of scruples being kicked to the curb in the course of increasingly cut-throat academic competition to win an IgNobel Award.

Of course there is some anecdotal evidence to support a link between blue eyes and disagreeable character.

On the other hand, here are some blue-eyed people who are so agreeable and cooperative with science-fiction illustrators that they have posed TWICE -- in the IDENTICAL POSE -- for two different books.

Disappointingly, Gardiner and Jackson have nothing to say about the personality correlates of metal-grey facetted artificial Tleilaxu eyes.

A pile of cobblers

Reading the small print of the paper, it emerges that the 'personality' side of the correlation consists of self-assessments on the five scales of the Five Factory personality model, i.e. it is a pile of cobblers. The Five-Factor model -- mentioned in previous issues of the Riddled Encyclopædia of All World Knowledge -- is a fine example of the 'looking under the streetlamp where there's more light' approach to psych research; the quantities it provides are numbers! which is more important than the fact that they mean two-thirds of SFA. There is a large investment of time, money, egos and people's careers in the FFM so it's not going to go away any time soon.

It also emerges that the authors were only able to obtain their significant association between eye-colour and personality by dividing their class sample of convenience into 'students with UK ancestry' and 'students with broader European ancestry', and leaving the latter third of the class out of the analysis. The argument went like this:

1. Blue eyes are common among Northern Europeans whose ancestors were Tundra-dwelling snowbacks and steppe-hoppers who lived up by the glaciers during the last ice age. In Frost's (2006) theory, these conditions predisposed the ladies of the day to select partners with a novel feature like blue eyes, novelty in a mate being HAWT.*

2. That inhospitable environment also selected for uncooperative personalities and selfish genes (as it were).** In Gardiner & Jackson's words,

-- though Magazine expressed it better.

3. The English population preserves that Mesolithic combination of genes, their racial purity unsullied by subsequent migrations and genetic influxes from more happy-go-lucky brown-eyed Mediterranean types. Yes, really.

A blue-eyed disagreeable reviewer might point out that this line of argument fails to link the purported genes of personality directly with those of eye colour, so the two traits might both be elevated in some population by dint of its pristine bloodline but they will vary independently... the covariance can only show up in a comparison with a different population. The theory does not predict the observations and the entire study falls apart as quickly under examination as my excuses for arriving home last night late and tired and emotional.

But the paper did introduce us to Frost (2006) as a theorist on tundra-dwelling mating strategies, and another example of Nominal Determinism in scientific career choice is always welcome.

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* Here Frost was attempting to explain the diversity of eye colours among Europeans, as compared to other ethnic populations, including populations in Asia and Siberia whose ancestors survived a sojourn in equally extreme Arctic conditions and by his theory should have equally diverse eye colours.

** My first thought here was that competition and antagonism are not really survival traits in barely-habitable conditions, where cultures survive because people cooperate; they are luxuries that are only affordable in temperate resource-rich environments. A blogger over at Sciblogs thought the same way. There is probably an evo-psych explanation for why we leaped to the same response; we must be related or something.

He who lies down with dogs, will soon regret smearing himself beforehand with liver paste and peanut butter. Or so I hear from a friend

The post to go with this headline cannot be found. It appears to have taken the headline's share of the profits and left the country for a destination outside the reach of extradition treaties.