Often it is better to lean forward. Leaning forward places your body weight on your entire foot and the pressure on your foot causes it to make better contact with the ground. This means that you are less likely to slip than if you lean backward which puts your weight on your heel, or the rear edge of your shoe, and is more subject to slippage.

This is a great advantage of trekking poles. The poles allow you to be much more forward, making better contact with the ground. In addition, the poles really do support a weight distribution that is in front of your foot. If your feet slip downhill, they slip toward your center.

Name₅₀ – Size of the group required for the given Name to have a 50% chance of being first on an alphabetical listing.

Late₅₀ – Size of the group required for an event having an equal chance of being postponed because of the absence of a single individual.

My name, Baxter, seems to have a surprisingly small Name₅₀ in the typical mostly American circles that I have moved in through my life. Throughout grade school, high school and college, whenever there were more than about 13 or 14 people in the class, I was second alphabetically. The Adamses, Bakers and Ballarons came first.

In the San Francisco white pages my name would appear on page 24 of 456. That means that my name alphabetically proceeds that of 432/456ths or about 95% of the admittedly atypical population of San Francisco.

By calculation, Baxter₅₀ is 1 + ln(0.5) / ln(432/456) or 13.82, a remarkable confirmation of my impressions above so take it with a grain of salt.

Late₅₀ obviously depends on the composition of the group, who it is that is late and what the event is, but it sure does seem like it is often a surprisingly large number. I’ve seen 50 people sitting or standing around waiting for one person who is only peripherally involved in the proceedings. Talk about the difference that one person can make.

I have no idea what either of these metrics could be used for.

Reasoning, when we do it, is mostly to find justification for what we already believe.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, in here.

Most interesting to me, this weird life could exist on Earth and have been overlooked because it is so unusual.

Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions. Because it is always possible, after the fact, to come up with a story about why things worked out the way they did — that the first “Harry Potter” really was a brilliant book, even if the eight publishers who rejected it didn’t know that at the time — our belief in determinism is rarely shaken, no matter how often we are surprised. But just because we now know that something happened doesn’t imply that we could have known it was going to happen at the time, even in principle, because at the time, it wasn’t necessarily going to happen at all.

Just like development, the current state of an idea in popular culture depends on the history of the idea and the random events that impinged upon it.

It seems that placebos have a real physical, not imagined, effect – activating the production of chemicals in the brain that relieve pain, a new study suggests.

In the next paragraph, they say of the placebo effect, that it “has normally been considered psychological.”

What distinction are they imagining here? Was the New Scientist under the impression that thoughts were some sort of non-physical spiritual emanations?

My imaginings exist in my brain as real physical and chemical phenomena. They aren’t some non-physical other. My psychology is mediated by my neurochemistry. They aren’t separable entities.

For instance, Rick at News You Can Bruise has recently visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He posts his annoyance over the ‘marine biology cartel now wants you to say “jellies” (or, I suppose “sea jellies”) instead of “jellyfish”, because those things are amazingly not fish.’

Boy would he be annoyed to hang out with me. I’m down with the whole precise labeling of natural creatures thing: sea stars, not star fish, dolphin fish for the fish, dolphin for the mammal. For cuttlefish I don’t say anything at all, but now that Rick has pointed it out, I’ll be saying cuttle if I need to refer to them.

Since he was at the aquarium, Rick was focused on sea creatures, but let’s not forget the insects. I say lady beetle not lady bug, lightening beetle, not lightening bug or firefly.

Rick asks, “How long has this been going on? Did people used to refer to cucumberfish, anenomefish, and urchinfish until someone rewrote the aquarium displays to encourage the biologically correct usage?”

The answers, forever and yes.

The categorization of plants and animals is an important part of human history, if only because it was important to distinguish food from non-food, medicinal plants from poisons, and prohibited foods from the foods all could eat. The earliest written encouragement of biologically correct usage was probably Aristotle pointed out that the whale was a mammal and not a fish. Linnaeus made a career in the classification of plants and animals, an in the process laid the foundation for the understanding of evolution. Understanding of evolution made the understanding of genetics possible, and understanding of genetics, in concert with molecular biology, has allowed the most precise understanding of the relationships of plants and animals.

Are these distinctions important for non-scientists in the modern world? Meat comes in packages with labels, so there is no need to distinguish between fish and beef. Produce comes prewashed. Why bother?

For me it is worth making the distinctions. It is such a little thing, calling things by their right names, but the understanding of the relationships of animals in the natural world is a very powerful tool for understanding the natural world and humans place in it. It is the foundation for all of biology. There is no area of biology that you can begin to understand without trying to understanding the evolutionary relationships involved.

Beyond that, this classification is a way of knowing. The history of our understanding of the relationships between different organisms is a pattern that can be extended to understanding of other phenomena and a standard by which other similar attempts can be measured.

Two problems:

For those of us on in the Pacific time zone and west to the date line, the Solstice was on Monday.

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory the solstice occurred on June 21 at 06:46 Universal. In Pacific Daylight Time that was 23:46 on June 20. I wish I had been paying attention at the time.

Problem two:

Can anyone explain to me how the seasons are delineated? More importantly, when did the span of the seasons move 1/8 of a year back. To Shakespeare Midsummer was June 21, but I was taught in school, and it seems to be widely accepted that summer starts on or around June 21.

The problem that I have as a life-long resident of the temperate climes, and Northern hemispheres, is that it doesn’t make any linguistic sense for December 19th to be fall and March 19th to be called winter. December 19th has much more in common with other winter days than it does with fall days.
December 19th has approximately the same length of day as December 23. The day on March 19th has much more light. The temperature on December 19th is likely to be close to the lowest of the year (winter) while on March 19th the temperature will be distinctly mild in comparison. The commonsense definition would put December 19th in the winter and March 19th in the spring.

I don’t really find any definitive statement that astronomers define the seasons at all. This page at Science World talks about the reasons for seasons, but gets side tracked in the rebutting the notion that the reason for seasons is that the Earth is closer or farther from the sun, and doesn’t cover why summer is thought to start on the solstice. If you follow the links from the season page to summer, fall, winter and spring, you will see that they are all defined as starting at their respective events of the sun cycle. This is an implicit statement about the seasons.

I would think that there would have been some astronomy convention (in both senses, arbitrary and political) that stated that the seasons ran from equinox to solstice and solstice to equinox.

(I don’t want to knock Science World’s site. It is great. Everything that I have looked at is very clear and interesting written. Recommended.)

I’m apparently not the only person who has a problem with this definition. Over at the Bad Astronomy site, Phil Plait, opines along the same lines as I have, although he is an astronomer, and presumably knows more about the subject than I do.

Phil adds to the argument that other modern cultures do consider the solstices mid-points of the warm and cold season. Japan is one example

The changes of seasons are the cross-quarter days and these have an ancient history. There were pagan holidays for all of these celebrated in Europe. Three of the cross-quarter days correspond to or have evolved into well known holidays: May Day, Halloween, Ground Hog Day. The early August cross-quarter day is Lammas.