Wednesday, September 4, 2013

John McCain was caught by a news photographer playing poker on his I-phone during a Senate hearing on the Syria Crisis while John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey gave testimony. He tweeted, “Scandal! Caught playing I-phone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing – worst of all I lost!” He is cute, even if he is on the wrong side of the political fence. If I had to have a Republican president again I wouldn't mind having him. I think he is an enlightened man.

Today I have to have the car taken to the shop. In 30 minutes, as a matter of fact. Better get dressed!

10:04 I'm waiting for the man from Quality Tire and Auto to call me. He said he would come around 10:00 with a trailer to take the car. Hoda and Kathy Lee are on. They are really zany and I enjoy watching them sometimes. They always have a glass of wine apiece, though I notice they aren't usually drinking it, and though they get a little wild sometimes they don't stray into the area of very bad taste. 10:09 The car man just called. He said he will call me in about fifteen minutes and I can come down to meet him. I want to take my book and go to his shop with him. I'm hoping it won't be a very lengthy repair session. If the man who helped me in the parking lot was wrong in his guess that it was the distributor cap it may take a long time and cost more money. I hope he was right. Maybe I should just stay here and give the man my car key. That way I can be more relaxed while I'm waiting. That's what I'll do. 10:20 Mike just came and took my car keys. Said he would call me in a couple of hours.

Reading about dogs now. The famous sense of smell is due to the extensive amount of tissue called olfactory epithelium, about 60 square inches in a beagle. The author says this is about as much as a typical piece of typing paper. Pretty big, but it covers a series of bony plates, which is how it all gets packed into such a short distance as a beagle's snout. It contains 225 million scent receptors, as compared with the human who has about five million receptors. A blood hound has 300 million receptors. The sharpest dog noses are a million times more acute than a human's. A dog can detect scent molecules in concentrations as low as the typical homeopathic medicine (a strange medical theory in which very small amounts of the “medicine” are given to cure an illness) dose, and they can identify and react mentally to a number of scents at the same time, whereas the human can only smell one thing at a time in most cases. They can detect the scent of prey which is no longer there, within the range of a few minutes. Identical twins can be differentiated by scent when they are together, but when the dog is set onto the tracks of twins that split up and walked in separate directions, the dog followed the wrong twin. With different people walking in a line and stepping in each others footprints, the dog being set to the lead man's scent, the dog can discriminate the lead man's track when he diverges into a new direction.

The vision of a dog is not as good as a human's in some ways and is better in others. Their eyes are set farther apart, so they see more to the sides, but they have less depth perception and distance vision. Flat faced dogs and “sight hounds” like the Afghan and Saluki have better distance vision and depth perception because their eyes face farther forward than most dogs and they have a wider range of sight with both eyes, or binocular vision. They still don't have as much binocular vision as humans and apes do. Dogs and wolves can see better in dim light such as dawn and dusk than humans, which is when many prey species are out and active. This is caused by their having larger pupils to let in more light. Humans see more detail than most dogs do, due to differences in the lens, retina and a structure called the fovea which humans have and dogs don't. It is a concentration of cones on the retina directly behind the lens. Dogs can't close their pupils enough to see in good focus in bright light. Their eye is geared to dim light. Dogs also have fewer “cones” in their eyes, which is the structure that perceives color. Dogs can see some color, but not as much as humans. They can see some blues, some yellows and gray, but not red, and the colors green, yellow and orange are perceived as yellowish. Due to a “streak” of cones on the retina, dogs and other animals that move fast can see movement better, especially on the horizon, where there may be a herd of prey animals. Dogs and other animals that have the “streak” of cones may not notice an animal or object that remains still. (Hence, many species will freeze in place when alarmed.) A dog's eye has an opaque, reflective layer of cells which causes their eyes to glow that eerie greenish color in the beam of a flashlight. He didn't say what the function of that is, but cats eyes glow that way, too, so maybe it helps them to see in semi-darkness. The author comments that you shouldn't buy a blue frisbee for your dog, because it will seem to disappear against the blue sky. This author, while informative, is very entertaining.

What about hearing? Humans can hear at frequencies between 20 Hz, about the frequency of a string bass at its lowest, and 20,000 Hz, or about three octaves above the high notes on a piano. A dog can hear about the same on the low scale, but up to about 40,000 Hz, in the range of what is called ultrasound. That is the frequency of sounds made by small mammals, which all dogs would hunt and eat in the wild. Even wolves eat mice, which I first learned from a great movie called “Never Cry Wolf,” in which a researcher camps the whole winter in the wilds of Alaska to watch wolf behavior and their predation on caribou. He is lucky enough to have a pair of wolves which have a den within sight of his tent to watch. They are not disturbed by his presence if he stays within a boundary that he set up around his tent by distributing his urine on the ground in a big circle. As he watches the wolves he sees the female repeatedly jumping up and down with her nose to the snow and grabbing mice. She could hear their squeaks through the snow. He sets up a humorous, but effective, experiment to prove that the wolves don't need to decimate the caribou population, because they are eating mice. I recommend that movie to anyone who likes animals. It came out around fifteen years ago, I think, and is based on a book by the same name which I also read, and which is a true account rather than fiction.

And then there is ESP. What could it possibly be, really, and do dogs have it? How can a dog know within ten minutes or so when their owner is going to show up at home, and be there in front of the door waiting for him? They operate on a “circadian rhythm” of 22 to 24 hours, depending on the dog, and can track time to that range, so they simply remember when the owner is due and become alert to the need to go to the meeting place, in other words the front door. The author cites a case when his friend gave his dog Sasha to them because the owner was moving away. For a time Sasha would go to the front door and wait awhile each day, but finally gave it up when she realized the her master was not going to show up anymore. Then out of the blue Sasha began to go to the door and wait again. The author found out that in fact Sasha's owner had made a trip to town that weekend, not coming by to see Sasha for fear of upsetting her attachment to her new owner the author. How did Sasha know her master was in town? The author cites Niko Tinbergen, an “ethologist” (a field of zoology that studies animal behavior) as saying ESP is due simply to sensory perception that is presently unknown to science, such as elephants communicating over long distances with other elephants using very low frequency sound. Also animals sometimes, but not in all cases, begin to panic and act odd before an earthquake. It is thought that their hearing or some other sense, such as perceiving electromagnetic waves, is the cause of it, with the earth giving off sounds or waves as it begins to shift, and before the major movement occurs. The author said that the Chinese town of Haicheng was evacuated by Chinese seismologists based on the behavior of animals, and that a major earthquake did occur the next day. So how do they find their way home from long distances? The author said scientists suspect that they can navigate by the angle of the sun's rays, by the polarization of light, or by some kind of electromagnetic sense. Nothing has been proven, however. Cats have also been known to do this.

Barking and the several other doggy sounds are used differently in differing circumstances, and are therefor not unlike a language. The author said that adult wolves don't frequently bark, though when in their pack they will sometimes do it as an alarm sound. Wolf puppies bark more often, and it is therefore a babyish sound, like the fact that their noses are shorter than adult wolves. Humans may have chosen animals to tame because they bark a lot, therefore giving a warning when there is danger or a stranger is coming up. There are a number of different kinds of barks and yelps and whines, plus the warning growl and the immediately threatening snarl. Humans can learn to interpret them with practice. Scientist have recorded these various sounds and graphed them on paper to explain them further. The “bark” sound of a dog is actually two sounds emitted in rapid succession, a higher pitched sound and a lower sound, and is an alarm sound. Many other animals and even birds also use alarm sounds with that high to low structure, and have a low pitched threatening sound. To me that tells me that it is a characteristic that goes a long way back over evolutionary time to the earliest mammals and birds and maybe even dinosaurs, if birds are descended from specialized dinosaurs. I also would guess that it is more characteristic of social animals than those that live a solitary life. I think a human shout for attention probably also starts higher pitched and then goes lower. I have seen some very interesting writing about specific animal sounds that scientists have recorded in some species which included a number of characteristic and specialized calls, some of which were used in very distinctive situations, as particular as the presence of a snake in the grass nearby or a raptor flying overhead. I think that was some monkeys that they were studying.

Howling is something that wolves all do, but most dogs only do occasionally. The husky, malamute, pack hounds and dobermans howl more often than other dogs. Dogs howl most often when they have been left alone at home or isolated outside the house on a chain, when another dog is howling, and in response to certain kinds of music. The author asks, are they singing? He says it hasn't been proven why dogs will howl along with a violin. It could be because the range of the violin goes up so high and hurts their ears, but I have sometimes thought it is because the violin can sound something like a wolf howling, and the dog will respond by howling along. The author said that howling is mainly a long distance communication method and can be either a warning to a stranger to stay away, or a greeting. They also howl in groups when they are hunting or getting ready to hunt. The author compared it to a pep rally. My first husband had a recording of wolves howling, and they sounded very musical. Maybe they actually are singing. Why not?

1:41 I have forgotten my lunch again. I still don't feel very hungry. I think I'll just eat some milk and peanut butter crackers.

The car is back from the shop. My mechanic is a really good guy. He doesn't overcharge or try to fool me into buying something I don't need. He saved me money by laboriously cleaning the spark plugs and several other things that had oil on them, replaced a fan that wasn't working, changed my oil and tightened up the spots where the oil was leaking. It cost me $404.00, but would have been more if he had simply replaced the parts that he cleaned. I have never had the car break down again immediately after he has fixed it like I did at another shop, and concluded that the mechanic broke something while he was fixing the original problem. This money will come out of my savings, but it costs money to keep a car, and at the age my car is it's a wonder it's not in the shop more often. It is a 1993 with 181,000 miles on it.

4:57 It's time for the news. I