I’ve been away in San Francisco for a conference. Pictures are now available. Things of note…
The Virgin Atlantic flight was one of the best I’ve been on. The on-demand entertainment was good, but the happy helpful staff made the biggest difference. Being able to send SMS from the plane was fun (US$2.50 to send; US$2.00 to receive), although my message was basically “hey, cool, I’m 32 thousand feet above Greenland!”. It seems like the message really did go at that time — rather than waiting to land, which I would consider to be cheating. Alas, the replies sent never made it to my seat.
Thank you Loren for taking us to Foreign Cinema for dinner. My first Mojito — what a fool I’ve been for missing out on this for so long.
We stumbled into
Massawa on Haight St for some yummy East African food. Must remember for next time.
And finally…. Somehow — and I’ve no idea how — Goul got onto the subject of Fainting Goats. In case you can’t see the video on that link, these look like normal goats, but when they get scared their legs stiffen and they fall over.
It wasn’t until I got home that I realized I’d seen fainting goats in real life on a previous trip to California. I didn’t see them fall over. I think there might have been a sign saying not to scare them.
Putting aside the entertainment value, this was being thrown up as a kind of “you think evolution is good, eh? Well what about these goats?”. And you have to admit that fainting because your scared isn’t a great survival strategy for an animal. At least not compared to running away from a predator. The usual answer to these kinds of issues is that the creature has no natural predators, but it’s different in this case: they’ve survived because they’re fun. New scientist put it like this: “‘It’s odd to think this breed survived as a pet because people made fun of it,’ says Carol Beck of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, whose team found the gene behind the muscle defect” (These goats may have even made it as “mutant of the month” in Nature Genetics, but I can’t check because I don’t have a subscription.) So there we go: they’re mutants that are fun to have around. Case closed.