Belugas, Dinosaurs and Mental Health Creativity

Been reading a few news articles and they made me think.
   One was a beluga that had learned to make human sounds. The story was that someone was in the pool with it, and someone was telling the human to get out, but they didn't know who it was. They then realised that it was the whale. Everyone was astounded. I wonder why. Belugas have often been called 'canaries of the sea', so it really is no surprise that it would mimic the sounds around it. As it lived with humans, human sounds would be the most natural thing for it to mimic.
   Also, there was an article about dinosaurs evolving feathers for mating displays rather than flying. Surely this is obvious? Most dinosaurs were fairly large, and the largest birds, such as ostriches and the extinct elephant bird, can't fly and their feathers are used for courtship displays. Also, it seems very unlikely that dinosaurs would evolve to fly and then evolve the feathers to help them.
   Finally, people who suffer from schizophrenia and depression are often more creative than non-sufferers. This makes complete sense. In a world where only yourself is certain, or the world outside is so sad, escape via creativity would provide soothing joy.

School Sports

Seeing people propose two hours a day for sports aren't sensible.

Two hours a day? No. School is primarily for learning, and two hours of sport means only three hours are left for this purpose. Unless school hours are to be increased, how are children supposed to learn all the information that they need to? I'm not saying that there should be no sports in school, just maybe a limit of two hours a week instead of a minimum of two a day.

Also, there's the declaration to get rid of the 'everyone is a winner' culture. That is not what happens. It's still nice to win, but that isn't what sport is about, because it is about taking part. If sport was just about winning, only those that were really good would enjoy it because only they could fulfil the 'purpose' of the sport, which would decrease the people of sport that would chose to do sport in their own time. That would be utterly counterproductive.

Argyll and Bute, Scotland

   Ten days without a phone signal and Internet, and where the minerals in the water make it the colour of the weakest apple juice. No matter how useful and pleasant technology can be, it's always nice to not have them once in a while.
   The mountains were stunning: beautifully untouched by humans. I had always considered the Malvern Hills to be big, hard climb, but seeing the mountains in Scotland made me quite glad that I didn't climb any of them!

We went to the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary in Oban.
       They only had only seal in the Seal Pools, which is really good because it meant the seals they'd been treating were are okay and in the sea!
       Annoyingly, someone took a flash picture of the octopus despite the fact that there were three massive signs asking people not to do so. I think it was fine, so hopefully no harm was done!

How to remember PHOSPHOLIPIDS in Biology

My creation of the merostrich (mer-ostrich) or hydrostrich (hydro-ostrich; water-ostrich) helped myself and my classmates remember the details of phospholipids for out Biology AS Level.

A merostrich lives on the ocean, its legs sticking straight into the air and its head in the water (as a nod to the silly notion that ostriches put their head in the sand).

Hence the merostrich's head is hydrophilic ('water loving' with 'philic' from 'philia' meaning love) and its legs are hydrophobic ('water phobic' as in having a phobia, being intensely afraid of something, NOT hating it).

A phospholipid has a hydrophilic phospate head and some hydrophobic fatty acid tails.

AS Levels

Five days until my first exam: Biology. Yuck.
   At least this year I only have seven. Only if every subject had coursework like English... which still haven't been given back to us. It's been four (or five) weeks since we gave in our final drafts. I respect that teachers have more than just my year group to worry about, but surely coursework should be prioritised?!?

Waiting to do my GCSEs was bad enough, but this is INTENSE! Each subject has twice as much information in it as a two-year GCSE. It is too much to remember: apparently, instead of taking modules in January, it's better to remember more for longer. Yeh... sensible, not really.
   At least when we start A2 after May half term I can drop a subject. That'll be tension gone.

Peri and How They Influenced European Fairies

 

Peri

This mythical creature in what was once Persia (mainly Iran but also Afghanistan and Pakistan) caught my eye.

Peri roughly translates to ‘fairy’ and the mountains in which they were said to inhabit was called Peristan (‘land of the fairies’, the ‘-stan’ suffix means ‘land’). They look like how we envision fairies today: small, delicate, and winged. Indeed, it is from the peri that Europe/North America got its predominant idea of fairy physiology. Even if fairies don’t all shimmer with the colours of the rainbow…

In Zoroastrian myth, peri were the forces of good constantly at war with the daeva, the forces of evil. The daeva often locked peri in iron cages at the top of trees. They were sustained by the perfume of other peri who fly by the cages. Come Islam, peri were considered to be the Fallen Angels who the Prophet Muhammad successfully converted them to Islam.

Fairy

So if peri changed how fairies looked, how did fairies look to begin with?

Rather boring in comparison. ‘Fairy’ was once a catch-all phrase for magical creatures with a human-like appearance and usually the size of toddlers; particularly in Celtic areas (think Great Britain and Ireland), they were also termed ‘elves’ after contact with Germanic creatures of similar appearance.

They lived for centuries. Going to their world through burrows or fairy rings was inadvisable: if you ate food there, you’d never leave; if you did return to Earth, a century could have passed. Iron hurt them. Some would help with housework (if offerings were left for them); others were more god-like in character and depiction. Those in the Seelie Court (benevolent) played harmless pranks on people when not helping them. Those in the Unseelie Court (malevolent) harmed humans for fun and often kept humans as ‘pets’.

Perhaps the most pressing issue about fairies in the mediaeval ages was the issue of changlings. When a fairy got tired of looking after their elders, they’d swap the elder with a human baby. The baby would be raised as a fairy, giving them new blood for their gene pool; the fairy elder would be raised as a human where their every need was taken care of forever.

The Outcome

Fairies were once these powerful beings yet when they got depicted more like peri (who were themselves immense creatures), their pretty, ‘feminine’ looks demoted them to being weak and helpless. The patriarchy demotes two for the price of one.

Critique: Horton Hears a Who

Horton Hears a Who really fails to demonstrate elephant intelligence.

To be lighter than a feather, he breathes in a lot of air. Air may be lighter than a feather, but if he inspires it, he's only adding to the weight, thus he is becoming heavier than a feather, even more so than before.

Vlad drops the picked clover into a massive field of unpicked clovers. When Horton goes looking, instead of looking for the only picked clover, he picks all the unpicked clovers. Stupid!

Blobfish

Have you ever seen a picture of a blobfish?
   On land, they're lumps of jelly with droopy noses and an aura of misery. Most fish on land, I suppose, would be miserable, but blobfish look truly distraught.
   In water, they have shape just like any other fish. They live right at the bottom of the oceans around Australia. Their jelly-like bodies help them survive the intense pressures they experience at those depths.
    Deep-sea fishing for crustaceans and other deep-living creatures means that the adorable blobfish are becoming extinct.

From God to Goats

I just watched the Playing God episode of Horizon on iPlayer and it was quite interesting. A few things were, well, wrong, but not severely so. These criticisms are based on religion and genetics.

Religion

First off, 'Playing God'? God, as in the monotheistic omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent being? Not really.

He (or She, God is in fact agendered but as humans are patriarchal God is always depicted as a He) created everything. This includes creating good and, because good can only exist with its opposite of evil, creating evil.

To play God, humans would have to create everything. This is, however, problematic. God, from a religious standpoint, has already created everything so there is nothing more for humans to create.

This may be disproved with 'God didn't create cars', but the metals, plastics and other car-things (I wouldn't have a clue) are made out of elements, which are natural. Humans just assembled them differently. So in this episode of Horizon the people were merely assembling life in different orders.

Thus, 'Playing God' is an inaccurate title, but I suppose 'Assembling Life in Different Orders' would have been a tad too long.

Genetics

The 'spider-goat' and the diesel-producing yeast were fascinating. The problem was that the programme claimed that it wasn't possible to produce these naturally. Admittedly it’s very unlikely and probably wouldn’t happen but likelihood, probability, is not the same as possibility.

With genetic engineering, they managed to produce a goat to produce spider silk in its milk. (The applications of spider silk production are fascinating.) Now, spider silk is a protein and goat milk is full of protein. With a mutation, it would be easy to have a spider-silk-like protein within goats’ milk. Admittedly this would hold no advantage to a goat so if it did acquire this mutation, it would most likely fade from the gene pool.