Tag Archives: science

Cooking With George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver with a flower arrangement of sweet pea. — The flowers in this portrait look suspiciously like sweet peas, too, which are legumes – although they’re not edible. Nice.

All too often, Black History Month is treated as an exercise in tokenism. Middle school students across the country get assignments to do biography reports, and George Washington Carver ends up on the list of subjects as That One Black Scientist Who Did A Thing You Can Relate To. I seriously have a problem with this approach, since it assumes that students can’t understand what he actually did do, making this whole peanut butter invention fiction an elaborate way to talk down to people while also de-fanging history. Well. NOT TODAY! I’m aiming for this to go up deliberately well clear of February, and this post is all about just how important George Washington Carver actually was, his key accomplishments, and why his work was so badly needed.

The Agricultural South – King Cotton

In the early years of the 20th Century, as before, the Southern United States was deeply dependent on cash crop agriculture. Centuries of putting cotton back on the same land had sapped nitrogen and other nutrients out of the soil. The crop on which the region’s economy depended was slowly weakening. To make matters worse, even as soon as the Civil War, other cotton-producing regions in the world had increased production, and the price of cotton had continued a slow slide downwards. Cotton remained as labor-intensive as ever, but wealthy landowners used sharecroppers rather than slaves – although these tenant farmers were often the descendants of slaves themselves, still tied to working another’s fields, through economic hardship. A sharecropper is a farmer who doesn’t own the land they work, and in exchange for their labor, gets a share of the profit from the crop grown on the land. Although some could work a portion of the land for their own kitchen gardens, it was more economical to put as much of a cash crop on the landlord’s fields as possible, and hope for a high profit. Frequently, they bought seed from the landlord, as well as other supplies, and were constantly in debt, unable to purchase their share out, and take up land for themselves elsewhere, or even move away. This fragile cycle of debt-slavery and cash cropping for cotton continued, with harvests getting slowly weaker, and the sharecroppers steadily poorer, continued.

The Nitrogen Cycle

While this slow-motion death spiral of soil degradation and poverty continued in the South, some important advances in our understanding of how plants grow changed the way we farm forever. Most significantly, for Carver’s impact, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault recognized in the late 19th Century that legumes like beans, vetch, and peanuts can fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, and therefore add nitrogen to the dirt they grow in rather than take it away. This nitrogen-fixing ability of legumes can be used to increase crop yields; if you’re growing crops that need a lot of nitrogen, it’s best to plant them either after legumes on a rotation, or with legumes in the same field. Intercropping and crop rotation for healthier and more fertile crops had been well-known and practiced before – by several Native American groups, for example, as in the Three Sisters intercropping system – but this approach was new to commercial agriculture in the United States, and required a change in culture. The picture below shows a cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) plant’s root system, and the round nubs attached to the roots are the root nodules, which house a nitrogen-fixing bacteria that works with the legume to suck nitrogen out of the air and feed the plant with it.

Cowpea root nodules. Nubbly. — Stdout [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletins

Working at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver ran the agricultural experiment station, and published scientific research as well as a series of booklets, which contained advice for farmers on best practices and increasing crop yields. Carver’s genius lay not only in scientific study, but also in understanding that economic, ecological, and social systems are interwoven. If you wanted to improve the life of the sharecropper, you had to increase the productivity of the land. If you wanted to increase the productivity of the land, planting legumes could go a long way toward nurturing the soil. But it wasn’t enough just to tell people to plant beans, peanuts, and cowpeas. These crops had to make money for it to make any sense for farmers to grow them. You had to provide people a concrete benefit for themselves. Rather than merely promoting the sowing of soybeans, Carver developed lots of recipes and uses for legumes, and popularized them through the widely-circulated bulletins, developing an economic rationale for introducing them into the regular crop rotation in the South.

Here’s a selection of these bulletins, so you can go read a few yourself (all of these are available at Archive.org):

A Study of the Soils of Macon County, Alabama, and Their Adaptability to Certain Crops

Alfalfa: the King of All Fodder Plants, Successfully Grown in Macon County, ALA

And, of course, the blockbuster smash hit –

How to Grow the Peanut: and 105 Ways of Preparing it For Human Consumption

They’re a very interesting read, actually. Some of them are closer to scientific surveys, presented for the public. Some of them focus on home economics tips, like how to preserve the kitchen garden harvest and save money. Many of them, of course, promote growing legumes, notably the one on alfalfa, above. The message is clear – grow alfalfa, make money on fat, healthy livestock (and, incidentally, restore nitrogen to the soil).

Disaster and Recovery

Meanwhile, as cotton yields gradually dropped, disaster finally struck the weakened cash crop. The boll weevil arrived in the United States and proliferated in the vast cotton fields. Cotton crops across the South were ruined. Famously, however, the town of Enterprise, Alabama turned away from cotton, and planted peanuts instead. As other communities scrambled to find and plant new crops, Enterprise prospered as early adopters of legumes. They commissioned a giant neoclassical statue of a woman holding aloft a giant boll weevil, crediting the insect with saving the town by forcing the farmers to wean themselves off the cash crop early. The statue’s still there, and it’s glorious.

A woman in a toga holds up a giant bronze beetle with a long face - a boll weevil. — Martin Lewison [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]

When you drive past a corn field planted in soybeans this year, you’re seeing the results of George Washington Carver’s tireless promotion of legumes and crop rotation. The agricultural South could well have collapsed with its dying cash crop, but Carver’s work at the Tuskegee Institute Agricultural Experiment Station and the bulletins paved the way to a more sustainable future – the one we live in. If you want to make a difference on a large scale, it’s not enough to just tell people to do things differently; you have to provide them with real improvement to their own lives, and a pathway to success.

Recipes!

As promised, here’s a couple of recipes adapted from the bulletins. I chose two that looked good, and were pretty different from each other, and had accessible ingredients for us city people of the slightly more Northern future. Interestingly, food ways have changed quite a bit in the century between the bulletins and the present, so it’s absolutely worth reading the original, to see what’s different. For example, the peanut recipes take it for granted that you have access to raw peanuts, not roasted and salted ones, and the regular raw peanut, or at least blanched, is probably what the recipes are calling for, unless they actually specify otherwise. Interesting. Also, with recipes of this age, they tend to assume that the cook knows more about techniques than we might today. So for a biscuit recipe, they’ll just say “to any good biscuit dough add…” rather than explaining how to actually make biscuit dough from scratch, which is a pretty involved process that you’d definitely have to learn first. I’ve gotten these as close as I could to what the original probably was like, while substituting ready-made ingredients where possible and convenient (thanks to Carver, of course), and explaining things that the recipes don’t.

Very obviously, the peanut salad contains peanuts.

My take on No. 61, Peanut Salad Number Two from How to Grow the Peanut: and 105 Ways of Preparing it For Human Consumption. I use ready-made mayo as a close approximation of the scratch-made salad dressing in the original recipe.

One tart green eating apple. One cup of roasted salted peanuts. Mayonnaise or plain salad dressing to taste. Romaine lettuce. Core and chop the apple, and pulse in a food processor with the peanuts until small pieces. You can also just chop them up, as long as it ends up the same way. Add mayo to the peanuts and apple mix and stir. Clean and carefully pull off the lettuce leaves whole, portioning them out onto serving plates. Spoon apple/peanut salad over the leaves and serve. (You’ll need a knife and fork to cut the lettuce up and eat the salad.)

A version of No. 39 – Cow Pea Loaf (A fine substitute for meat) from How to Grow the Cow Pea and 40 Ways of Preparing it as a Table Delicacy.

You’ll need: a sturdy mixing bowl, a very strong fork and unflinching resolve, or some sort of mixing machine like an egg beater. A baking pan, and an oven. A cup of sauteed diced green peppers and onions (think: fajita leftovers, or get someone to help you cook them). A can of black-eyed peas (they’re cow peas and they’re already cooked). Melted butter or neutral tasting vegetable oil. Okay, here we go! Open the can of black-eyed peas into the bowl, reserving the can liquid, and mash and whip the peas with the fork, until smooth and light. This is going to take a while. Mix in the peppers and onions. If the mix is too tough and crumbly, add the pea juice until it’s like a very stiff pudding that can be sculpted. Grease the baking pan, and form a loaf out of the pea/peppers/onions pudding. Bake in the oven on about 350 F, and brush the butter or oil over it periodically to keep it from drying out. Cook until browned and firm. Basically, pretend it’s a meatloaf. There’s a recipe for cow pea custard pie, too. I also really want to try the cow pea salads, which look honestly great, but we already have a salad on this list. Oh, and it’s a substitute for meat because meat was expensive.

Go read the bulletins, seriously. There’s so much more than peanut butter to be found here.

A Brief (ha) History of Underwear

Go ahead, laugh: get all those giggles out of your system. Yes, this is the underwear post. As it turns out, though, underwear is anything but frivolous. There are actually a lot of important things underwear does, from the practical to the cultural, and – since we’re due another humanities post – this one will be a fairly thorough historical overview of how your very own modern underwear came to be, and how technology and cultural shifts shape what we wear. You may be surprised by just how much there is to learn!

IMPORTANT CAUTION: This Big Fat Historical Survey will only cover European underoos, since those, in the main, are the ones that mutate into the majority of current fashion. Maybe someday, we’ll do a cross cultural analysis of underwear, which would be cool.

What Underwear Does:

Protects outer clothes from the oils and sweat of your skin
Supports and shapes outer clothes
Extra layer for warmth or even cooling
Communicates

So, with all this in mind, let’s start (because this is where fashion of the time makes it easy) in the last years of the 1400s.

Meet the Chemise

Albrecht Dürer wearing about as many layers as possible, in fashionable disarray. — Self Portrait by Albrecht Dürer, 1498. Note the chemise, the white garment with the embroidered band right against his skin across his chest. Very nice. A fun detail is that, although everything appears to match, the lower arm portion of the sleeve seems to be detachable, in case you want to wear them with a different top.

By 1498, wearing your clothes like you rolled out of bed and just don’t care was in fashion, fortunately for us. This means that we can see plenty of the chemise, which was basically a really long undershirt. Dürer here is wearing his chemise practically on the outside, with his clothes wide open at the chest. You can also see a bit more chemise sleeve puffed through slits in the sleeve, too, especially at the elbow. While early chemises were very plain, by this point, people wanted you to see it, and they began to be embroidered at the neck, or gathered up and stitched, like the very tiny pleats you can see on the artist’s own chemise. The chemise was worn by everybody, since its main function, aside from looking fashionable, was to absorb sweat and oils and gunk from the skin before it could soil your actual clothes. The bottom hem of the chemise usually ended up tucked into the hose, or eventually breeches. Pants or slacks as we know it didn’t really exist.

The Reign of the Hose

Hose were the other universal underoos, and were basically separate leg sleeves, like whole-leg socks, and could therefore be mixed and matched. Hose were held up with ties to a belt under your clothes, or, for very short menswear, even sewn together into proto-pantyhose.

Dürer engraving showing a man in baggy giant stockings, and a woman with an elaborate hairdo. — The young farmer and his wife, Albrecht Dürer. Here’s how clothes worked for normal people, and not the ultra-wealthy.

Fashions at this point created an interesting problem: men could wear their tunics long or very short to nonexistent. Note that separate leg sleeves mean that there’s a need to invent coverings for sensitive bits if the hemline rises too far. That’s what a codpiece is for. Fairly rapidly, we end up with the classic poofy breeches, codpiece, and stockings combo of the menswear of the next two centuries. Fashion history aside, though, men and women just keep wearing stockings and the chemise for several more centuries, until the French Revolution.

Famous portrait of Juan de Pareja. — Portrait of Juan de Pareja, By Diego Velázquez. Oh, and the chemise develops a detachable collar, which eventually become the ruff, and then stock, and doesn’t really go away entirely until the advent of the washing machine and dryer, mid 20th Century. Ask your grandparents about laundry day and shirt collars.

18th Century Revolutions and a Side Note on Stays

So, eventually, women still wore separate stockings, attached at the belt or held up with garters, and men’s stockings were held on by the sheer pressure of the cuffs of their buttoned up breeches. The codpiece was long gone, and elaborately buttoned fall front flies ruled the day. Everybody still wore the chemise, though, and stockings were still in, until the French Revolution would switch men to pants, permanently. Seriously, that’s what happened. Stockings were expensive, so regular people tended to wear pants. During the French Revolution, it might well be risking your head (literally) to look too aristocratic, so French men started wearing pants. Everybody looked to France for fashion, and pants spread. Within a few decades, stockings for menswear would be completely dead, except for a few ceremonial vestiges.

Stays were support undergarments, generally worn by women, and they were one of the options to tie your hose to. Stays and eventually corsets and girdles weren’t always about pinching the waist, but also provided support for accessories like tie-on pockets, key rings, sewing kits, bustles, crinolines, panniers, and so on. Lest you assume that stays were strictly for the ladies, here’s a great cartoon that actually shows a bunch of men’s body-shaping underthings in 1819, for gentlemen who wanted to achieve a fashionably wasp-waisted silhouette with nice legs:

A fashionable gentleman fusses at his dressers to pull his stays harder. — Think that those Beau Brummell style fashion plates of the 1820s are unrealistic for any human figure to achieve? You’d be right. Mr. Darcy and company are almost certainly wearing a LOT of undergarments like calf pads and stays to cheat the system. Note the implication that being over-fashionable is somehow un-English: having an “D____n big John Bull Belly” being undesirable to the dandy in question.

Remember: no boxers, briefs, jockeys, whatever – he’s got his chemise stuffed into his breeches. Also, for centuries, there were only a few ways to fasten and shape clothes to stay on and fit the body: laces, ties, pins (yikes), or buttons. Velcro, snaps, zippers, elastic, and truly stretchy fabrics – all of which we use to do the same – were firmly 19th or 20th Century innovations. This is a major factor in why young children wore dresses, until the boys were old enough to handle the complications of breeches. To illustrate, here’s toddler Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an adorable sundress and hat, looking pensive on a donkey.

Donkey and toddler FDR in a cute sun dress and hat. The future president is wearing the sun dress, not the burro. — Pretty sweet setup. I think it’s a double-sided wicker chair pack saddle thing, and looks wildly unsafe. This kid will grow up to be president during the Great Depression and WWII.

Enough about menswear, though. Because of their lower hemlines, women’s stockings never had to change beyond tie-able thin socks until very recently. Similarly to the situation with gentlemen, actual panties as we know it didn’t exist because that’s what the chemise was for. By modern standards, absolutely everyone went commando because hemlines were low enough to conceal everything. (Under normal circumstances. Kind of puts Fragonard’s famous painting The Swing or can-can dancers in a very different light, huh?) As for keeping legs warm in the wide skirts of the 19th century, there were pantalettes. Imagine ankle or knee length frilly cotton or wool (itchy!) leg sleeves that tied on to the stays or to a belt. In this picture, the pantalettes are the frilly cuffs you see around the ankles, below the skirt:

Pantalettes seen under the hem on two small girls. — Words cannot express how hard it is to find quality images of actual pantalettes. Portraits were for important, rich people, and girls young enough to be wearing visible pantalettes weren’t important enough generally for their own portraits. Or, I could get pictures of women in pantalettes, but not normal ones, because they had some kind of job that required specialty underwear, like circus performer, dancer, or coal mine pit brow worker. Not kidding. I also don’t really trust fashion plates of the time, and so many of those images of perfect lacy pantalettes were for boys, anyway.

Bodily Functions Interlude!

On the subject of going commando, and pantalettes as separate leg sleeves, this means that the problem of “how did they go to the bathroom” basically is resolved by the fact that nobody’s underthings worked like the modern versions. Here’s a (perfectly safe for school and work) video. You’re welcome! As for the dudes, it’s just an awful lot of buttons, for breeches, or otherwise normal pants. When it comes to monthly bodily functions for the ladies, imagine basically cloth or rags buttoned, tied, or pinned to a belt. This is why safety pins (also a 19th Century invention) are a big deal, folks. You live in a world that has achieved comfortable, convenient, safe fasteners for your clothes.

Corsetry, Swimwear, and Materials Science

So, you may have noticed that even by the late 19th Century, we don’t really have the advent of actual underoos as we know them. Between holding up stockings, pantalettes, and crinolines, corsetry is actually the foundation of a very complicated suspension system. That’s why women wore girdles, even way past the time that wasp-waisted silhouettes were in fashion.

A very 1920s corsetry ad from Barcley custom corsets. It's all about holding up the stockings. — Roughly a dozen more buckles and adjustable clasps than I’d want to deal with at least twice a day. There’s stockings, but they don’t hold themselves up. This is probably the most 1920s thing you’ll see this week, too. Note that we’ve still basically got the chemise, under the girdle. The basic pattern – chemise, stockings, stays – still hasn’t changed, despite the differences in fashion in over 400 years.

It was over the 20th Century that things really started to change. Innovations in materials science, actually, gradually made new and exciting clothing possible. You could have stockings that held themselves up, for example. Or elastic bands rather than ties that made actual underwear like you’re used to feasible. Stretchy fabrics meant that you could buy off-the-rack clothes that fit like a glove. For a while, this was so new and exciting that the trope that “in the future we’ll all wear skintight body suits” took hold. Ultimately, though, in the far-off and futuristic year 2019, we only wear skintight and futuristic underwear. Oh, and undershirts on the outside, since that’s what the t-shirt eventually derives from: the chemise. It happened fast, mostly because there was another category of clothes that needed to be fairly form-fitting, reasonably warm, and easily washed and absorbent. Swimwear! (Technically also weird, specialty underwear like the union suit, as well, which eventually became two-piece long underwear as soon as we had elastic to hold it up. Union suits, being one piece, had that hilarious buttoned buttflap.)

If you look at swimwear from 100 years ago, it really does look suspiciously like modern underwear.

Tug of war in knit wool swimshorts and shirts. — Tug-of-war on the beach, Southport, Queensland, Australia. 1917! Forget all those stuffy ideas you have about Victorian swimsuits. People did have fun back then. The women are wearing their hair up in scarves.

By the 1930s, short shorts had never been shorter, barely visible under a shirt:

A team of Aussie lifeguards, from about 1930. — St. Kilda Surf Life Saving Team, 1930. Manly, New South Wales, Australia. (No, really. It’s the name of the beach.) The weird side-window on the shirts was in fashion, too. I don’t know what’s with that, but I’ve seen it several times in 1930s swim shirts. I’ve also never seen a lack of swim shirts on men, at this time either. Apparently men couldn’t go topless swimming, but swim trunks could be super tiny.

The reason swim trunks existed was because now public beaches were a thing. Before the 1800s bathing craze, it was easy to decide what to wear when you went for a swim: nothing (or you just didn’t swim). But, if the beach was mixed-sex and public, swimwear had to be invented.

The techniques, at least, already existed, and could be rapidly adapted for new underwear. As for the advent of modern clothes, if you’re really lucky, you can find people in really old photos, wearing something that wouldn’t make anyone look twice on the street today. Especially in informal situations, like students or street scenes, or factory workers, or farm hands. People’s “best clothes” tend to be fashionable, which is instantly dated. The trick is also to catch people so that they aren’t so aware there’s a photographer: body language changes over time, substantially. Here’s an article on a famous case of a “time-travelling hipster” from 1940, but I found several more, too:

Dancers at a juke joint, 1939. — The woman in the white sweater, scarf, and riding boots and breeches. If she was standing in line with you at the grocery, you wouldn’t even notice anything was off. 1939. Also, note the guy in a short sleeved shirt on over long sleeves. The cut of the trousers are a giveaway, though.

Woman in a yellow baseball cap, with short sleeves and overalls, 1944. — Lathe operator in an aircraft factory, 1944. When you work with heavy machinery, practical clothes are the only way to go. Also, this is a woman: men couldn’t wear hair that long in the 1940s.

Guy in wrap around glasses and a ribbed t-shirt at a drill press. — Fashionable hipster, or 1940s factory worker? Nice ribbed t-shirt, and those wrap-around glasses, as safety glasses, here. 1944.

Man in a tan rolled up shirt with a hat and normal sized pants. — This guy? He’s a 1941 sugarcane cutter, in Puerto Rico. It helps that he doesn’t have his belt halfway up to his armpits, or a hilariously tiny necktie, as was the style at the time.

Japanese-Americans used as farm labor, 1942. It looks really hot too. — Eeeeeevery last one of these perfectly normally-dressed people in jeans and various sensible hats are all Japanese-Americans working on a farm since being locked up at Tule Lake Relocation Center in California. Circa 1942.

Basically it’s easier in the 1930s and 1940s, because you’ve got most modern materials, making more recent clothing styles possible; there’s cameras and film allowing for faster shutter speeds, and less deliberate more candid photography; the Great Depression and WWII forced people to cut back on insta-dated fashion choices like lots of makeup, elaborate hair treatments, and new clothes. Go, explore archival photos of regular people doing hard work and find some time-travellers of your own, in old photos!

Big Ideas – Rocket Science

I hope you view my contributions to the Teen Blog as an invitation to challenge yourself, think hard, and learn new things. This entry marks the start of a new series on the teen blog, Big Ideas. So far, I’ve only introduced major themes and academic concepts obliquely, and as they happen to come up in the course of talking about something else in depth. In these Very Special Episodes, we’re going to tackle them head on, so you can prove to yourself that you can think Big Thoughts fearlessly. Very few things indeed are truly Too Hard or Too Complicated to comprehend the outline of. If you do, though, you’ll understand everything around you in a deeper way. Tragically, you won’t unlock most of these Big Ideas until sometime in college, maybe. I think this is deeply stupid and unfair, so that’s why I’m writing these, to introduce you to as many really Big Ideas as possible, in an approachable way.

To prove to you that you do have the ability to understand Big Ideas, let’s start with the most proverbially Big Idea of all.

This IS Rocket Science

Actually, it’s physics, mostly, and a little bit of chemistry.

Since I’m never one to do anything half-way, let’s make an example, where we can explore some of the math and concepts needed to put a living thing in orbit. That’s right: we’re going to model a solo orbital mission. For this, you’ll need Newton’s laws of motion. (Spoiler Alert: FOR NOW, you need Newton’s laws. I’m planning to cover special and general relativity later.) I’m going to write a summary in modern English, because here’s how Newton put it.

Yeah. So, basically everything academic that was published back then was in Latin, so everyone across Europe with a high level of education could read it. This is also the book in which Newton details calculus (Don’t forget about Liebniz too!), and also there’s universal gravitation in there, and also some extensions of Kepler’s laws… the Principia is kind of a big deal.

Are you ready? Here’s your cheat sheet!

newton's laws, the gravity equation, and the gravitational constant in a cheat sheet.

Tricky. How about we pick a model, where someone’s done something similar before?

Mercury-Atlas 8 summary, comparing the mass of the capsule to the launch vehicle.

Now, let’s chart a path to orbit by thinking through what we have to do to get something to orbit the Earth and come back. The objective is less to do the math than it is to get an intuitive idea of what the math means, and therefore a feel for the physics. It’s all about how much the mass of the rocket escalates as you add more mass it needs to carry.

why a Syrian Hamster is perfect for a space mission.

P. S. A note on just how dang fast these rockets have to get the capsule to. Sigma 7’s orbital period was a little under 89 minutes. Imagine circling the entire Earth in just under an hour and a half. That’s how fast something has to go to stay in orbit. Given that F = ma, you don’t have to do the exact math to figure that even a tiny chunk of space junk slamming into a satellite or something at these velocities would be a Very Bad Thing, especially since this sort of collision would result in even more space junk orbiting at stupidly high speeds.

P. P. S. For a nice illustration of how the need to accelerate to a high enough speed fast enough impacts rocket design, compare the Atlas D series to the Saturn V rockets. “But Katherine,” I hear you whine, “what about the outer solar system probes, like New Horizons, or Voyager? Those rockets were way smaller.” Indeed. Probes can’t suffocate, die of thirst, or starve. Spacefaring humans definitely can. With a probe, you just need to get it out of Earth’s gravity well, and coast to a bigger planet or several to get a boost from their gravity wells to gain more speed. If it takes decades to do it, who cares, because it’s powered by Plutonium pellets. It’ll be fine, probably. With people, they need to breathe air, drink water, and eat. You gotta get ’em to the Moon and back, FAST. The Saturn V is a balancing act between how much fuel you need to accelerate to speeds that will save you on mass in terms of air, water, and food vs more fuel. It weighs 2,970,000 Kg. That’s a gobsmacking 5,940 Thoroughbred race horses. Glorious.

P. P. P. S. (Post-Post-Post Script) It should be self-evidently clear by now that Newton was right about that First Law. There’s precious little to exert a force to slow you down in space. The Earth doesn’t need rocket engines to keep going around the Sun. The Moon doesn’t need rocket engines to keep going around the Earth. I’m sorry if I just ruined several space odyssey movies for you. No stern chases in space. If your ship is already going faster than your pursuers’ top speed, you already got away, past tense. Just NO. Also, no sneaking up on things in space. Don’t even get me started on the consequences of relativistic speeds and Faster-Than-Light-Travel. We’ll get to ruining space movies in devastating detail later, when we do relativity, I’m sure.

The Surgeon General of Bacotania

I find that news releases on health research often do a lousy job of communicating what the findings actually are, and how they might inform people’s decisions. Often, in order to make sense of them at all, you have to know some statistics, read between the lines, and cut through the hype. The problem seems to be especially severe in the case of a study on the scale of something impacting populations, but hyped for the public because the authors don’t trust the reader to care unless they’re scared. There’s a difference between public health and personal health, and although the two are connected, statistically, the conclusions can be wildly different depending on your point of view – managing populations, or managing your own choices. Also, when people make decisions about their own health and safety, they fall prey to some particularly nasty logical fallacies (all natural means harmless, or it’s not cancer, so it’s fine – or, “not likely to be me” means that “it won’t happen to me”). Even nastier, research on sensational subjects – like all scientific research – often turns up complicated or ambiguous results that get distilled into inaccurate clickbait. Never fear, though, let’s play pretend, and sort through, now and forever, how to think about statistics and clickbait-y health headlines. (I sourced the images in this article from Wikimedia Commons, as usual, and the attributions are at the bottom of this page, to help maintain the suspension of disbelief.)

About Bacotania

Vintage photo of a woman wearing bacon slabs on her feet, standing in a giant skillet.

1. Skillet Skating is a Bacotanian folk dance, recently nominated for inclusion in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists in which the dancer wears slabs of bacon on their feet and skates around a giant skillet with a giant spatula. A good performance is said to prevent the sticking of eggs in the coming year.

Bacotania is an imaginary country with a rich cultural history deeply intertwined with the consumption of cured pork. The total population is about 12 million, and national holidays include February 4th, Remembrance Sausage Day, and October 16th, Bacotanian Liberation Day. The festivities of Liberation Day culminate in a Liberation Day Bonfire Feast in which chunks of pork belly are roasted on sticks over Liberation Day Bonfires in honor of the heroic air drop of canned bacon into the besieged capital city of Schlachteplatte.

A giant can of bacon, 70 years old, WWII rations from the UK.

2. One of the historic bacon cans in the National Museum of Bacotania.

A fire pit with two long forks full of fresh raw bacon held over the flames.

3. Bacontanian Liberation Day Bonfire with skewers of bacon sizzling over the open flames.

Needless to say, bacon is very important to the people of Bacotania, and the loss of cured pork products would cause immense damage to the economy and culture of the country. The 2015 decision by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer to classify processed meat consumption as a Group 1 Carcinogen was met with increasing public unrest, including mass demonstrations outside the Surgeon General’s office in Schlachteplatte, which led to the Surgeon General stepping down from their post.

Congratulations! YOU have just been appointed Surgeon General of Bacotania.

What is your advice, concerning the consumption of cured pork products?

You’ll need some further information:

What is a Class 1 Carcinogen? In a masterpiece of shoddy journalism, a lot of press outlets didn’t discuss what the classes even meant. The IARC classifies substances based on how conclusive the evidence is that they cause cancer at all, NOT even remotely based on how dangerous they are. There’s only one item in Group 4, the Probably Does NOT Cause Cancer group, and that’s Caprolactam. I’d never heard of caprolactam before doing the research for this post. It’s used in nylon manufacture, and it’s definitely not harmless, but we’re pretty sure it doesn’t cause cancer. Nobody seems to have studied whether, say, pure water causes cancer.

What is an individual’s chances of getting cancer from bacon? The average lifetime chance of getting colon cancer is about 4%. According to the World Health Organization, the chance of getting colon cancer rises by 18% for every 50 grams of processed meat consumed per day. Now, we need one more bit of information, and that is the average consumption of processed meats. According to this study, average daily consumption of meat (all types) was 128 grams per day, and 22% of that was processed meat. So (22% of 128 grams gives you how many grams are processed meat) that means that the average person eats 28.16 grams of processed meat per day. So, if you start at 4% with 28.16 grams, and add 18% of 4% for every 50 grams eaten over the 28.16 gram starting point, you end up with an average Bacotanian’s cancer risk.

How much bacon does the average Bacotanian citizen eat? Bacotanians are very fond of processed meat, and a traditional Bacotanian Breakfast involves lots of sausage, so they eat twice the processed meat that Americans do, at 56.32 grams per day.

What is the average Bacotanian’s cancer risk then? Well, we need to figure out how much more processed meat than the American average an average Bacotanian eats, and then figure out what proportion of 50 grams it is, and then add that proportion of the 18% of 4% to the average 4%. Got it? Let’s go!

56.32 – 28.16 = 28.16, because it’s twice, remember? Easy!

28.16 extra grams eaten divided by 50 (grams to raise risk by 18% of 4%) = 0.5632 (amount of the 18% excess risk we should add)

0.5632 of 18% = 10.1376% Cool. Now we’re getting somewhere.

10.1376% of 4% = about 0.004, which is 0.4%

So, the average Bacotanian faces an elevated lifetime colorectal cancer risk of 4.4% on account of their huge processed meat habit. This means that for the average bacotanian, their MORTALITY ROULETTE WHEEL lands on DEATH BY BACON not much more often at all compared to the American population. (Bacotanian healthcare and mortality from colorectal cancer are comparable to ours.)

How many excess colorectal cancer cases are likely to occur in Bacotania if people continue to eat processed meat at this pace? Well, 0.4% of the total population are going to lose that roulette round, so…

0.04% of 12 million is… 48,000. YIKES! That means that Forty-eight THOUSAND Bacotanians are going to get cancer from bacon, above and beyond even the background colorectal cancer rates. If you factor that in, it’s a staggering 528,000 cancer cases. The cost to society, and the personal emotional toll on all those families is absolutely astronomical. And, clearly, partially preventable.

So, that’s how the same decision – eat the bacon, tell people not to eat bacon – ends up looking very different from the perspectives of an individual Bacotanian and the Surgeon General of Bacotania. The Bacotanian might well accept the risk, shrug, and tuck into a full Bacotanian breakfast of smoked sausages anyway. Note that although it’s a Class 1 Carcinogen, processed meat has a much smaller chance to cause cancer, compared to other Class 1 Carcinogens, like Asbestos, which (depending on your own exposure) can have lifetime risk rates as high as a 25% if you were a construction carpenter in the United Kingdom for a couple decades before 1980. Also, note that this only concerns cancer risk, not whether the cancer has a high mortality rate, and not concerning other health risks associated with the substance. (Remember that although Caprolactam is the sole occupant of Probably Does Not Cause Cancer Group 4, it’ll still cause your skin to slough off. Nice.)

So, maybe suggest that Bacotanians cut back on processed meats, but that the Bacotanian Liberation Day Bonfires likely won’t do you any harm.

Probably want to suggest the closure of Ye Wooly Salamander Particle Board Mill, though…

Vintage Photo, United States of America. No, I have no idea what’s going on here. By UW Digital Collections [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
British Ration Can of Bacon from WW II. Seriously, my heaviest of two cats weighs 12 lbs. That’s a LOT of 70 year old bacon. By KingaNBM [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
Hungarian Szalonnasütés By Christo [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Bon Air Science Fair!

This upcoming Tuesday at 6pm, Bon Air Library will be hosting a program full of science experiments for teens, all supplies provided! Experiments will include Elephant Toothpaste, Silly Putty, Ice Cream, and building a wave machine. Come check it out!

What’s Elephant Toothpaste? Here’s a more extreme demonstration!

You Fight Like a Cow

Monkey Island notwithstanding, your life might just be better if you take “you fight like a cow” as a compliment. The truth of the matter is that – whatever Tennyson and the Victorians’ moralistic viewpoints – “nature red in tooth and claw” really mostly holds true only for predatory attacks on food animals in actual nature. Even then, few predators will attack prey with a mind to getting in a fight. After all, if your food stands a good chance of thrashing you in a fight, the predators won’t be around for long. An actual fight is just too risky. It’s not like there’s emergency veterinary hospitals in nature. Even a small cut could get infected and eventually kill you. A broken bone or chipped tooth could prove fatal if it means you can’t catch meals. As an aside, this is one of the major forces shaping the evolution of venom. The geographic cone snail has some of the most outrageously potent and fast-acting venom of any creature, purely because it’s a snail that eats fish. If a fish, once bitten, had any chance to run away or fight back, cone snails would have a very rough time just catching breakfast, let alone surviving it.

Given how much animals in the wild stand to lose from fighting, most will go to a lot of effort to avoid a fight in the first place. Lots of animals have specialized equipment – horns, antlers, ossicones, tusks, gill frills, song – specifically for settling disputes with other members of their own species in a way that keeps it from getting too violent too often. There’s a whole suite of behaviors that virtually all animals have to prevent fights in the first place and settle those that do occur as fast as possible.

Let’s talk about cattle. They actually have one of my favorite conflict sequences, and you can plainly see how cow disputes progress through several stages at each of which the parties have a chance to de-escalate the conflict, or decide to proceed to the next step.

The Official Cow Fight Procedure:

Rival Cow Spotted!
- If you know this cow, and you each know where you stand with each other, you’re cool, and both can back down now. If either has any doubts, proceed to step 2.
Angry mooing.
- Let the rival know you’re not happy about this incursion. If the rival responds with more angry mooing, and you don’t want to back down either, keep up the noise and proceed to step 3. Otherwise, if you get no response, the rival agrees to back down.
Pawing of dirt to signal aggressive intent.
- If each cow is still prepared to get in a shoving contest, they’ll proceed to step 4.
Standing sideways to each other to show off size.
- If either individual decides that the other is too big to take on, they’ll just quiet down and walk away to eat grass. Otherwise, if both are convinced that they can take the other, proceed to step 5.
Prepare to lock horns.
- Both cattle lower their heads. This is the last chance to back down, and can be very brief.
Shoving contest.
- The rivals lock horns, or rest their heads against each other (if polled or hornless), and try to shove the other until one disengages and walks away.
Resolution.
- When one of the rivals backs down, it is possible to continue angry mooing, and allow the rival to angrily moo a bit to save face. If the issue isn’t settled, the cycle might repeat (but usually doesn’t) until the cattle can predict who will win the shoving contest and accept the results. Generally, just once is enough to settle the issue. Most of the time, cow fights don’t even get to step 6 at all before one of the rivals backs down.

You can watch the whole complicated sequence below, with these two Hereford bulls.

Switzerland has a whole sport based on introducing cows to each other in the Spring. The cows spend the Winter on their individual farms, but in the Spring, they get together again for the drive to alpine pastures. Of course the cows need to settle who’s top cow, and it was only a matter of time before people started painting numbers on their sides and setting up concession stands. Yes, these are actual cows, too, not bulls. Note udders. When a cow backs down, she’s removed from the ring until only one cow remains, and is crowned Queen of the Cow Thunderdome. Sorry: “Queen of Queens” technically, as the cow fighting is called the “combat de reines” or literally the “fight of queens.” Cows are Very Serious Business in Switzerland, in case you couldn’t tell.

These cows are all members of the Herens breed of cattle, and are selectively bred for cow fighting. Meet Penelope, a Queen of Queens.

Notice that nearly all of the Official Cow Fight steps are about communicating a problem and providing plenty of chances to back down. And if the other cow does, but they make a lot of noise about it, let them. It’s all just angry mooing.

Once everything’s settled, even Herens Queens are perfectly chill with each other, and pass their Summers in idyllic alpine meadows.

Plenty of other animals have an official fight procedure, like cows do, it’s just that in cows, it’s so clear and well-defined. There are plenty of videos of Complicated Cat Space Negotiations, for example. Just remember: if there’s video of it, someone found it interesting and exciting enough to record, so for all of these videos of cow fights, there’s lots and lots of cow fights that never happened. This is an example of selection bias – if you were to study how often cows fight, cow fight videos on YouTube would be junk data to draw on, because people are way more likely to record and post interesting video of cows fighting than the many, many allegedly boring instances of cows not fighting.

That Actually Happened: Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani

What is a princess? You’re probably thinking something along the lines of this:

A pretty woman in a fancy gown lying to a frog about kissing him.

Anne Anderson’s illustration from The Frog Prince.

Fancy gowns and circlets notwithstanding, princesses usually get married off for political purposes to princes, and every major event in their lives is generally determined by other people’s decisions. Queens regnant – those who rule in their own right – are not what you’re thinking about, and not what people mean by princesses. That’s not how it generally works in Europe. We could go on yet another deep introspective pop cultural analysis of what it means that princesses are role models for young children, OR we could unpack that massive string of qualifiers I just dropped, and you probably didn’t notice, because we’re so used to thinking of European history as just plain history. Nevermind that one cannibalistic intrigue riot/coup that the Netherlands had that we already treated, or the fact that rage-throwing people out windows as a political statement was common enough in Prague (then Bohemia, now Czech Republic) that there’s a word for it: defenestration. Or the practice of castrating boys so their voices don’t change during puberty so they can sing soprano for the opera, or church choirs, or … I could go on forever about how weird European history is. No, really. I could. It does a disservice to the richness of history to just let your mind gloss over it like it’s normal. All history is weird and wonderful, and all you have to do is take a closer look. Everything deserves to be weird; everything deserves attention.

Princesses who actually do something: that’s not generally how it works in Europe.

Hawai‘i: Structure of Power

Let’s put the ‘ back in Hawai’i, first. What is a ‘ anyway? It’s a glottal stop. The little pause added to make space between d’s in “good dog” – “good’dog.” Watch this video, and listen to some Hawai’ian language, to get a feel for how it all goes together. Back with me? Good. We’re going to be using that glottal stop something fierce. The first time I use a term, it will be in bold, but I’m not going to put all non-English terms in italics, because this would be almost impossible to read.

Welcome to Hawai’i before the takeover by the United States. The Hawai’ian ruling class are the ali’i (not to be confused with the ‘a’ali’i which is a plant – that’s why spelling is important). This class derives its power from their ancestors, reaching back to the gods. High ali’i, or ali’i nui, ruled entire islands in the archipelago, and bestowed land use rights on ali’i below them, who in turn had the right to give land use rights to the people who would work the land. This authority and power ultimately passed on from the gods themselves is called mana. Depending on family ties, ritual correctness (observing kapu – ritual restrictions), political power, and social prestige, different people had more or less mana.

(I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I like history because it’s like looking under the hood of a car, and seeing how it works. Sure, it’s all functioning automobiles, but what’s going on inside could be wildly different. Some civilizations are like four-stroke engines, some the rotary engine, and some are like electric induction motors – common in household appliaces, but also in electric cars. Completely different mechanics might be happening, and that’s exciting and cool!)

Anyway, Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani lived in a time when the Kingdom of Hawai’i was in crisis. Just years from being overthrown by (mostly) fruit magnates and a pro-US navy cabal and handed over to the United States, the court and ruling Kamehameha family were under tremendous pressure to conform to European norms as to what a monarchy looked like, and how royals acted. The Hawai’ian royal house pursued a policy of assimilation – to try to win respect of the great world powers by looking and acting as much like European royalty as possible, in the hope that despite being not as strong militarily, they would still be respected as kings and queens that they were.

World History Spoiler Alert: ultimately, this effort was doomed because of racism, pineapples, and Pearl Harbor. Racism, pineapples, and Pearl Harbor are all connected, because of imperialism as an economic and social structure. What do the great powers want? Sw33t pineapple fr00t. How will they secure it? Navy depot at Pearl Harbor. Justification for overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawai’i to get it and cash in? Racism.

Pineapple field, with pineapples, in O'ahu.

By Nandaro [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Behold! Pineapple, toppler of nations. The Kingdom of Hawai’i wasn’t the first, or the last, government to be taken out on account of the fruit cartel lobby, and their insatiable bloodlust for sw33t l33t fr00t l00t. There’s a reason vicious dictatorships that have the window dressing of democracy with none of the actual government mechanics of it are known as repúblicas bananeras. Why, on this glorious blue Earth, there’s a clothing brand named after this phenomenon, I have no idea.

Anyway anyway, concerning political authority and mana, being a princess as an ali’i isn’t just a matter of being a daughter of a king or something. (Being a princess if you’re a member of European royalty generally is a matter of being a daughter of a king. Unless you’re legitimized or something later, which is another thing I want to treat on this blog, because it’s delightfully complicated. And, after all that, you won’t be a princess, technically. Looking at you, Marie Anne de Bourbon.) Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani’s mother was High Chieftess Keoua-wahine, and two other powerful ali’i claimed her as their daughter, which means that she had two well-connected fathers, as well. As such a po’olua ali’i, she was set up for a position of great status and power in the Kingdom. Then, as part of the Kamehameha family’s attempts to remake the government along a European model, the Constitution of 1840 effectively barred her path from the pinnacle of power by making her birth a liability rather than an asset. This in no way stopped her from being Governor of Hawai’i, though. While the rest of the royals tried their hardest to erase their culture and become as European as possible, Princess Ruth Ke’elikolai Wasn’t Having It. At All.

Princess Ke'elikolani Not Having It at a photography session.

Magnificently Not Having It. About role models: make having just 1/10th of this self-assurance and dignity a life goal. Of course, she comes by it naturally, but still.

She built several huge palaces on her lands (which were most of the Big Island, after all) in the latest architectural fashions. Check out her last, and fanciest palace, Keoua Hale, finished right before her death, in 1883.

An incredibly fancy, Late Victorian style tropical palace.

This palace is actually bigger than the official royal palace of the Kamehameha family, too… just sayin’.

BUT, she also had a traditional grass palace built, too, as a statement of her support and patronage of Hawai’ian culture.

A high-roofed grass house, with glazed windows.

The Palace of Not Having It. You can even see one of her other palaces, in the background.

She also supported traditional culture and arts, like the Hawai’ian language, poetry and verse, chanting, lei making, religion, and hula dancing. The art of hula – under pressure from missionaries and having lost wealthy noble patrons to their tactic of assimilation – nearly died out. Let me say that again: 150 years ago, the world almost lost hula dancing. Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani commissioned performances, and supported traditional dance, and effectively saved hula for a revival under King David Kalakaua. No Princess Ke’elikolani, ultimately no Merrie Monarch Festival.

Not Generally How it Works in Europe…

While the United States of America was coveting the heck out of Pearl Harbor, and fruit merchants were plotting to overthrow the Hawai’ian government, women (especially married ones) in the United States, and much of the European-derived cultures worldwide were under coverture. This legal status for women meant that they couldn’t bring suit, they couldn’t own property independently of a man, except in some very specific corner cases, and they didn’t even have rights to their own children. In short, women were not legal entities on their own at all, much less Governors of Hawai’i. Oh, and don’t dare think of just not marrying, because women couldn’t inherit property either, and were barred from most jobs – at least most jobs that made actual money. That’s why the stakes are so high for the Bennett girls in Pride and Prejudice – if they don’t marry, they lose everything.

One way to think of it is this: Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani was a (massive) property owner in her own right, and a political force to be reckoned with. She was also married. When did married women in Kentucky gain the right to own and control their property – you know, actually have property? Go on. Guess.

Yowch. No, really. Kentucky finally passed a Married Women’s Property Act in 1894. Eleven years after Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani – Governor of Hawai’i, wealthy landowner, patron of traditional culture – died. That’s just one way that this long, twisted tale of social power structures, greedy fr00t magnates, hula, and the power of force of personality casts its shadow on your life, right now. Everything is interesting, everything is connected.

It’s the Potatoes

March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, which in the USA is generally treated as an excuse to wear green, eat and drink green things, and party.

Everybody’s Irish for a day, even if you’re Japanese:

By Kounosu (Self-photographed) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This mystery might be clarified a bit with the information that the picture above was taken in Yokohama, which has a massive United States armed forces base in it. Which still begs the question of why St. Patrick’s Day is such a big deal. Sure, it’s an excuse for a parade and party, but we live in a city that has a two week festival for a two minute horse race. There are plenty of excuses, so why this one? Why the Irish, specifically?

By Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia (Llama, Salta, Argentina) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

A llama in a tiny hat. We’re not in Japan anymore.

The story of how St. Patrick’s Day partying went global actually starts in the Andes mountains of South America. Yes, really. Lots of wild potato species live here, and the people in the region domesticated some, and bred them into what would become a world-dominating staple crop. Potatoes are basically awesome in every way. You can feed a family for a year on just a quarter acre of potatoes. You can freeze dry them and store them almost indefinitely. Or you can put ’em in a giant warehouse with EPIC MUSIC. Even if they’re not freeze dried, they keep well as long as you put them in a cool dark place. Eventually, when Europeans came to the Americas, the potato was one of the many food crops they brought back with them.

MEANWHILE in Ireland, geopolitics and economical stuff was going on. Irish tenant farmers grew cash crops for export to England on behalf of their – again, mostly English – landlords. Enter the potato. Since you can get so many potatoes out of such a small amount of land, the tenant farmers came to depend on potatoes as a staple food crop. Less land devoted to food production means more land for the cash cropping, which also means more export profits. A large part of the population soon depended on potatoes to supply the bulk of their caloric needs.

MEANWHILE MEANWHILE a disease of potatoes – now known as Phytophthora infestans or potato late blight – was introduced to Europe, which – combined with bad weather – caused a massive failure of the potato crop.

A very bad potato, rotten on the inside, thanks to potato late blight.

Potato Late Blight: that’s not good. It’s also not edible.

For people affected by the same potato disease and weather in most other parts of Europe, this was bad news, but they had other crops to fall back on. In Ireland, though, where much of the population relied very heavily on potatoes, this was a catastrophe. With the food crop completely rotten, and government failing to take effective action in time to prevent the food shortage, mass starvation set in, and much of the surviving population left Ireland. Here’s a map of Irish population decline during the Irish Potato Famine. Maps are wonderful things. There’s plenty more reading you can do on the Irish Potato Famine, and the Irish diaspora, too.

Long story short, famines aren’t like natural disasters; they require societal specialization followed up by food crop failure and breakdowns of organization or failures of supply in order to happen. So that’s how green cookies, South American civilizations, and why we have seed banks like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are interconnected. Everything is interesting, and everything is intertwined. Explore connections. Generally, the more you learn about something, the more interesting it becomes.

English Language: Bizarrely Precise Animal Vocabulary

As hinted at in the Amazing Mules post, due to some historical quirks, the English language has a truly ridiculous amount of incredibly specific words relating to animals. This goes light years beyond preschool “the Cow Goes Moo” stuff that everybody knows. In fact, most of this is so insanely, ludicrously exacting that you’re unlikely to ever use it or even know it, unless you take up a hobby related to the animal in question, in which case it falls under specialized jargon. Why learn it at all then? Because these words can reveal an awful lot about the history and society that produced them, and the people who need this vocabulary today. You’re not going to come up with and agree on an intricate vocabulary relating to, say, inducing a bird of prey to hork up a hairball made of its un-digestible prey remains – called casting, unless it’s really important. Rest assured, what you see here is just the very tip of the English animal terms iceberg.

Here’s your obvious LANGUAGE WARNING for the post: due to use as insults, some of these words have become “bad words” in modern English. I can’t censor anything, since the whole point is to learn the vocabulary.

Keep an Eye Out! It’s Historical Background!

There are a few processes at work here, as to why English has so many animal vocabulary words. Let’s look at four of them:

Modern English is a constantly changing mishmash of several languages. At the time in which these animals were so important, the Normans were in power in England, and a lot of the courtly animal-terms were adopted from their language. This is especially obvious in the case of meat vs the animal it comes from. This is why it’s a quarter pound ground beef (beuf) burger, and not a quarter pound ground COW FLESH burger. As a contrasting example that proves the rule, this didn’t happen in the related language German, and that’s why in that language, pork is literally SWINE FLESH.
(Highly ritualized) hunting was a foundation of medieval European society, and was a means of enforcing class dynamics. Proper use of the jargon separated the nobles from everyone else, and maintained the shape of society. There are several weird holdovers of this dynamic today, that we notice from the United States of America, where we jumped the tracks before a few key social changes in Britain, proper. There’s probably a whole post on this in the future, but, suffice to say in Britain hunting and hunting opposition is very much tied into class conflict, where here it isn’t so much. Robin Hood was outlawed for killing the King’s deer, but here everybody was eating venison to survive, and even today we just try to make a buck. Look for animals people probably hunted.
Actual jargon. In the same way that we work with computers as a basic matter of keeping our society running, and therefore we have a bunch of highly technical terms for computers, what computers do, and parts of a computer, when everything ran on literal horsepower, there was a whole host of specialized horse terms. Look for animals people needed and lived closely with in their daily lives, or to do their jobs.
The wanna-be brigade. For some of these animals, when they were beginning to be bred selectively in the 18th and 19th Centuries, people who participated in this dawning animal fancy wanted to make their hobby more respectable and legitimate by coming up with specialized vocabulary, to match the historical ones. Look for animals that were part of the selective breeding boom in the last 300 years, like cats.

Let’s Learn Some Really Precise Animal Terms in English:

Ankole Watusi cattle lying around in a field.

Ankole Watusi cattle in a field. My personal favorite breed of cattle. They’re a status symbol, a medium of exchange, and basically the cattle equivalent of a purse dog. Cows aren’t always about meat and milk.

The Cow Goes Moo!

The sound they make – low

Cows, as a species – cattle

A group of cattle – herd

Cattle-like – bovine

Baby – calf

Female, before first birth – heifer

Female, after giving birth – cow

Male, castrated – ox, steer

Male, adult and intact – bull

Female, born as part of a set of fraternal twins with a male calf, exposed to enough testosterone in the womb that she acts like a bull – freemartin (see what I mean about ridiculously specific?)

The Horse Goes Neigh!

The sound they make – neigh, whinny, snort, scream, nicker

Horses, as a species – horses

A group of horses – herd

A family group of feral horses – band

An all-male group of mostly unrelated feral horses – bachelor herd

Horse-like – equine

Baby – foal

Female, before puberty – filly

Female, after puberty – mare

Male, before puberty – colt

Male, castrated – geldling

Male, adult and intact – stallion, horse

Male, adult, and with an un-descended testicle – ridgling

The Ass / Donkey Goes Hee-Haw!

The sound they make – bray

Donkeys, as a species – donkeys, asses

Doney-like – asinine

A group of donkeys – herd

Baby – foal

Female, intact – jenny, jennet

Male, castrated – gelding

Male, adult and intact – jack

Sheep are also amazing. Shear them to get wool. The grease from the wool is highly prized lanolin, which is sold in high-end skin creams.

The Sheep Goes Baa!

The sound they make – baa

Sheep, as a species – sheep

Sheep-like – ovine

A group of sheep – herd

Baby – lamb

Female, intact – ewe

Male, castrated – wether (a wether won’t get your ewes preggers, or go aggro on the other sheep, and he’ll follow the herd wherever they go. They used to put bells on them, so that if you heard the belled wether, you’d know where the rest of the sheep were. That’s why the word for an individual that shows the direction that the rest are going, or where they are is BELLWETHER.)

Male, adult and intact – ram

The Whale Goes (cetacean vocal range extends from infrasound to ultrasound – good luck with figuring that out).

A group of whales – pod

Baby – calf

Female – cow

Male – bull

The Cat Goes Meow!

The sound they make – meow, hiss, caterwaul

Cats, as a species – cats

Cat-like – feline

A group of cats – clowder

Baby – kitten

Female, intact – queen

Male, castrated – gib

Male, adult and intact – tom

birds, flowers, and puppies silk scroll.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a human culture that doesn’t have dogs. The style of this Korean silk painting by Yi Am (Joseon Dynasty, first half of the 1500s) just makes them look even softer and cuter. PUPPIES!!

The Dog Goes Bark!

The sound they make – bark, howl, growl

The howling of a pack of hunting hounds on the trail of prey – bay

Dogs, as a species – dogs

Dog-like – canine

A group of dogs – pack

Baby – puppy

Female – bitch

Male – dog

The Falcon Goes Skreeee!

(Except they don’t, generally. The famous piercing scream used as a stock sound effect for birds of prey is actually very specific only to the Red Tailed Hawk, which isn’t even a falcon. Birds you’ve heard this used for, like Bald Eagles, actually make very different sounds – in their case, the Bald Eagle goes tseep eep-eeep eep eep … twitter-itter-itter-itter … twitter-itter … tseep eep.)

Falcons, as a group – falcons

Baby – eyas

Female – falcon

Male – tiercel (Male birds of prey are usually noticeably petite compared to the brawnier females, on average about 1/3 smaller. As such, the males are quicker, but the females generally take larger prey, and were the more favored birds to hunt with.)

The Chicken Goes Cluck!

The sound they make – cluck, cheep, crow

Chickens, as a species – chickens

A group of chickens – flock

Baby – chick, chicken

Female, adult – hen

Male, castrated – capon (Yes, this is a thing. Fun fact about puberty: the signal to stop the growth spurt, develop secondary sex characteristics, and put on muscle in male animals is sent by the testes. Some castrated male animals go through a growth spurt that never slams to a halt like this, since the signal never comes, and get bigger and fatter than they would have, until the rest of their hormonal system just kind of gives up on puberty and settles down. As the biggest, fattest, and most tender of chickenkind, as well as the fact that some surgery is required to make them, capons are pretty expensive. Check the specialty frozen meats in the store to see what I mean.)

Male, adult and intact – rooster, cock

Although they’re not so common here, and therefore quite expensive, ducks are a hugely important livestock and eggs animal in other parts of the world.

The Duck Goes Quack!

The sound they make – quack

Ducks, as a species – ducks

A group of ducks – flock

Baby – duckling

Female – duck

Male – drake

The Goose Goes Honk!

The sound they make – honk, cackle

A group of geese – flock

Baby – gosling

Female – goose

Male – gander

The Swan Goes (…)

The sound they make – hiss, (there’s a reason they’re called Mute Swans)

A group of swans – flock

Baby – cygnet

Female – pen

Male – cob

What Does the Fox Say?

What does the fox say? – yip, yelp

Foxes, as a species – foxes

Fox-like – vulpine

Baby – kit

Female – vixen

Male – tom

Mistletoe

In the middle of Winter, in our temperate climate, you might not think there’s much nature to be seen. But, right now, with leaves off the deciduous trees, it’s the best time of the year to spot a freaky plant parasite of trees. Plants grow so slowly, that you might think they’re not very lively, or even boring. Look closer, though, and be patient, and you might see that plants are perfectly capable of as much drama and violence as animals are, if given enough time. From competition to chemical warfare, plants are actually fairly exciting, and this post is all about the most famous plant parasite of all.

Mistletoe is the common name of a family of related plants, the Santalaceae, nearly all of which are parasites of other plants, mostly trees. During the Summer, when their host trees are covered in leaves, you might not even know they’re there, but in Winter, the mistletoe growing on the tree is exposed, evergreen, when the rest of the tree is left bare. From a distance, mistletoe growing in a tree looks like this:

By Lienhard Schulz (Own work) CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s a little green bush, perched in the branches of a tree. How does it happen? Well, here in Kentucky, we mostly have Phoradendron leucarpum, which makes white berries.

By Joe Decruyenaere (originally posted to Flickr as 010408 080) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Although the berries are poisonous to mammals, birds love them, and eat them, pooping out the seeds on the branches of trees, and then the seeds germinate. The seeds sprout, but instead of making roots like other plants, they make a structure called a haustorium which penetrates and connects with the host plants’ vascular system through the bark, delivering nutritious sap to the mistletoe. These little green vampires continue to suck the sap of their hosts while also growing green leaves and stems, in the form of a bushy growth. Our mistletoe is capable of making its own sugars with sunlight energy, just like regular plants, to some extent, but it can’t make roots and instead literally taps into the host to get what it needs.

mistletoe on a branch, chillin' like a villain.

By Loadmaster (David R. Tribble) This image was made by Loadmaster (David R. Tribble) Email the author: David R. Tribble Also see my personal gallery at Google Photos (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

A few mistletoe bushes won’t hurt a healthy tree, but one that’s already sick could be killed by a very heavy infestation. Mistletoe bushes are just like plant leeches, if, instead of biting, a leech actually grafted itself to you, interconnecting your arteries with itself. I also just found out that some South African mistletoes – like Viscum minimum – don’t even go as far as to make a little bush. They don’t photosynthesize to any noticeable extent, living almost entirely inside their Euphorba succulent host, bursting out only to flower and set fruit.

Tiny Visicum minimum plant growths, barely noticeable on the surface of a succulent, like plant acne. Plantcne?

By Frank Vincentz (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Look at those tiny Viscum minimum plant growths, barely noticeable on the surface of a succulent, like plant acne. Plantcne? So cute, yet so creepy. Here’s the flowers:

By Frank Vincentz (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Like Alien chestbursters, but permanently attached. And cute.

Have a safari in your own neighborhood this Winter. Look for mistletoe bushes. Notice birds – we’ve got different birds staying here in Winter, compared to Summer. Listen for Great Horned Owls staking out a territory. Even in Winter, nature never sleeps, and there’s wonders all around you, if you just keep aware of them. Including the weird tree-leeches known as mistletoe.