Category: learning curve

Penetration of the Oral Mucosa by Parasite-Like Sperm Bags of Squid: A Case Report in a Korean Woman

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You what?!?

Yep – it’s one of those moments where you have to sit down and take a long look at what you just read.
And re-read. But even when you do, it will still read:

Penetration of the Oral Mucosa by Parasite-Like Sperm Bags of Squid: A Case Report in a Korean Woman

That’s because it’s the title of this paper, which descibes how:

a 63-yr-old Korean woman experienced severe pain in her oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along with its internal organs. She did not swallow the portion, but spat it out immediately. She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity.

And what caused that pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity?

This did.

Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa. On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.

But just what does that mean? Step forward Danna Straaf from website Science 2.0 – a woman whose claims expertise in these matters is obvious from the moment she states that:

I’ve probably had hundreds of spermatophores ejaculate on my fingers and never felt a sting.

As Danna says, that’s probably because the skin on the human hand is too thick for those pesky squid spermatophores – essentially bags of squid sperm – to penetrate. Not so your flimsy oral mucosa.

That’s why Danna doesn’t eat half-cooked squids. Probably.

So should we calamari fans freak out right about now (that’s if you haven’t already freaked out having digested (sorry) the contents (sorry again) of this post thus far)?

No – we “Western” squid nibblers are just fine:

First, most Western squid preparations remove the internal organs and serve only the muscle, so there’s no danger of accidentally ingesting spermatophores.

Oh, and just in case you were thinking about getting bags of squid semen and popping them into your oral cavity:

Second, it’s perfectly fine to handle spermatophores – just don’t put them in your mouth.

Consider yourselves educated. And slightly less hungry than you were five minutes ago.

Quiz Time…

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Here’s a Euro 2012 quiz question from the guy who used to do the pub quizzes I attended in the UK:

What links Jakub Blaszczykowski, who scored for Poland yesterday against Russia, with ex-Denmark midfielder Stig Tøfting, who played in Euro 2000?

Don’t bother with football. Forget your thoughts about implausibly large Scrabble scores or tenuous ties to Top Gear. The actual answer is far more bizarre.

See here:

As a child, Blaszczykowski witnessed a tragedy, which had a major influence on his life. When he was eleven years old, his father stabbed his mother to death.

and here:

During the 2002 World Cup, Danish weekly gossip magazine Se & Hør ran a story that Tøfting, when aged 13, had returned home from school to find the bodies of his parents. His mother had been shot by his father, who shortly thereafter turned the gun on himself. The story had been kept secret for years, as Tøfting had not yet told his children.

Ah. The delicate subject of matricide. A crime which, somewhat ironically, probably increases during major football tournaments.

Cold

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This is not a weather post. Yes, everyone is aware that it’s been chilly in SA lately, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go on about it like a Gautenger in a thunderstorm.

No, this is a post about Linden Gledhill’s DIY snowflake machine and the video he made to Ryan Teague’s track “Cascades”.
And here it is:

Described on YouTube thus:

The movements of a music box ballerina are reinterpreted in a groundbreaking video for British composer Ryan Teague using electromegnetic fields, sub zero temperatures and 2000 volts of electricity.

I saw it here and despite Gledhill being a biochemist (and therefore probably a bit dull), I’m impressed with his homemade snowflake manufacturing process and the somewhat hypnotic video, which:

 took months of planning, four days of shooting and roughly two terabytes of photos to animate the growth of hard-to-create ice crystals.

The dancing, contorting trees you see at the beginning of the video are ice structures — most no more than a fraction of a millimetre across — which were grown on the tip of an electrically charged, motorized needle.

Gledhill has previously done some other amazing photographic things with insects and paint; that link to a hugely interesting story of how and why he does what he does.

Notes on Japanese ship-naming conventions

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Yeah, I know. That title. You’re already disinterested, but hey – hang tight – you might just learn something today.
I know I did.

Japanese fishing vessels have been all over the news lately. If you count the one that ran aground on Clifton Beach last month and the one that was found drifting off the coast of Canada in April, that is.
The former has sadly dropped out of the news and even now, no-one is really sure how it ended up parked among the holiday homes of the German elite. The latter was a victim of the March 2011 tsunami and has been drifting across the Pacific ever since.

Their names: the Eihatsu Maru and the Ryou-Un-Maru. And I’ll use this handy opportunity to chuck the name of the only other Japanese fishing vessel I know in there too: the Meisho Maru 38. Some of that one lies aground near Cape Agulhas and has surely featured in many photographs, but most notably, this one:

Eagle-eyed readers should really give the eagle its eyes back, but in the meantime, they will have noticed the common “Maru” in the names of all these vessels, because eagles are good at spotting that sort of thing.

When you look  up Maru on Google translate, it tells you in mean “circle” and also, if you look a little below that, “suffix for ship names”. But why?

Well, god bless the internet, because Wikipedia can help us out with an answer on their helpfully named: “Japanese ship naming conventions” page, which discusses and explains Japanese ship naming conventions. And it tells us:

The word maru (meaning “circle”) is often attached to Japanese ship names. The first ship known to follow this convention was the Nippon Maru, flagship of daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s 16th century fleet. There are several theories which purport to explain this practice:

  • The most common is that ships were thought of as floating castles, and the word referred to the defensive “circles” or maru that protected the castle.
  • That the suffix -maru is often applied to words representing something that is beloved, and sailors applied this suffix to their ships.
  • That the term maru is used in divination and represents perfection or completeness, or the ship as a small world of its own.
  • A legend of Hakudo Maru, a celestial being that came to earth and taught humans how to build ships. It is said that the name maru is attached to a ship to secure celestial protection for it as it travels.
  • For the past few centuries, only non-warships bore the maru ending. It was intended to be used as a good hope naming convention that would allow the ship to leave port, travel the world, and return safely to home port: hence the complete circle arriving back to its origin unhurt.
  • Note also that Hinomaru or ‘sun-disc’ is a name often applied to the national flag of Japan.

Today commercial and private ships are still named using this convention.

Of course, there are many superstitions and traditions in Japanese society and there are probably (at least) an equal number in the seafaring community, so it seems perfectly reasonable that when these two behemoths of folklore come together, we get this well-observed custom of nomenclature.

That said, many of the reasons given above are centred around the protection of the vessel and its safe return to port and that hasn’t really held true for any of the ships I am aware of (n=3). Let’s not forget that one ended up on a local beach, another ended up on some fairly local rocks and another was sunk by the US Coastguard “for safety reasons” (and, let’s be absolutely honest here, fun).

Look, I recognise that it’s Friday afternoon and you aren’t in the mood to learn stuff. But you’ll be thanking the Japanese Seagods and 6000 miles… at your next pub quiz, believe me.

Assuming there’s a question about this sort of thing, of course.

London 2012 – Want to take your camera?

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Some interesting news via PetaPixel on the rules surrounding non-professionals taking their cameras along to events at the upcoming London Olympics:

While larger venues might be more lenient, camera equipment over 30cm long (about 12in), including tripods and monopods, will not be allowed in most of the venues. In addition, attendees have also be warned that there is no storage available, so if you surrender your camera equipment to security, you’re not getting it back. If you have any doubts regarding your equipment, it’s better to leave it in your room.
The most interesting rule, however, has nothing to do with the camera equipment you use, but rather with your smartphone. Attendees, while they will be allowed to bring iPhones and Android phones into the venues, will not be allowed to use them as WiFi hotspots — in other words, if you wanted to connect your SLR (with an acceptably short lens) or WiFi enabled camera to social networks via your phone to do some on-the-fly uploading, you will not be allowed to do so.

Those size rules compare favourably with those at even minor events at the Cape Town Stadium. 30cm is assuredly big enough to satisfy anyone’s needs (said the actress to the Bishop). But the wifi thing is not only rather odd, but also surely completely unenforceable, especially since they also state that they are fine with live uploads to Facebook and the like on smartphones.

At the end of the day (or indeed at any other time), it really doesn’t bother me, since I’m not going along. But overall, I think the restrictions are a lot less draconian than many people would have expected.