From Spiegel…..

McGaugh and his staff realized they were looking at an exotic case, perhaps even a scientific sensation. For that reason they took a thorough approach, and for five years they subjected Price to batteries of neuropsychological tests, combed the professional literature for similar cases and developed special questionnaires to allow them to test her memory.

Once she was asked to write down the dates of all Easter holidays from 1980 to 2003. “It took her 10 minutes, and she only got one of the 24 dates wrong, where she was off by two days,” says McGaugh. He had Price repeat the test two years later, and the second time she got all the dates right. “I thought that was especially impressive,” says McGaugh, “because she is Jewish. Easter means nothing to her.”

The scientists were able to verify her autobiographical data because she has meticulously kept a diary since the age of 10. She has filled more than 50,000 pages with tiny writing, documenting every occurrence, no matter how insignificant. Writing things down helps Price organize the thoughts and images shimmering in her head.

In fact, she feels a strong need to document her life. This includes hoarding every possible memento from childhood, including dolls, stuffed animals, cassette tapes, books, a drawer from dresser she had when she was five. “I have to be able to touch my memories,” Price explains.

McGaugh and his colleagues concluded that Price’s episodic memory, her recollection of personal experiences and the emotions associated with them, is virtually perfect. A case like this has never been described in the history of memory research, according to McGaugh. He explains that Price differs substantially from other people with special powers of recall, such as autistic savants, because she uses no strategies to help her remember and even does a surprisingly poor job on some memory tests.

This week’s rant of the week is Patenting Life by Michael Crichton.

From Spiegel….

The Netherlands’ emergency preparedness personnel spent all of last week conducting an exercise dubbed “Ergst Denkbare Overstroming (EDO),” or worst possible flooding, a scenario in which they virtually placed one-third of the country underwater. In the computer models, the entire west and north coasts, as well as low-lying areas in the large Rhine River delta where two-thirds of the country’s 17 million people live were submerged.

The scenario spells pure horror for the Dutch. Just in time for the spring tide, under a full moon, a giant low-pressure zone with force 11 to 12 winds (wind speeds of 64 to more than 73 miles per hour) rolls in from the North Sea. The storm surge pushes five-and-a-half-meter (18-foot) waves against storm barriers along the coast. But the elements have even more in store for the unfortunate Dutch. There is a thaw in the Alps, and it has been raining heavily in Germany for days. The Rhine River is carrying 16,000 cubic meters (4.2 million gallons) of water across the German-Dutch border — every second.

The experts have calculated that this scenario is likely to occur once every 4,000 years. “But what good is this number to us? It could happen in a week,” says Berghuis, “and that’s why we would rather be prepared.”

I am surprised that the Netherlands has lasted as long as it has. I would not want to be dependent on a man made systems of dikes to keep dry.

From Danger Room….

The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize sites containing chemical or biological weapons: rocket balls. These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno. The makers call them “kinetic fireball incendiaries.” The Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about them, but published documents show that the fireballs have undergone tests on underground bunkers.

The ideas that some people come up with up never cease to amaze me. I have wonder how well it would really work in the field though.

From the New York Times…

High school textbooks call it the tongue map — that colorful illustration that neatly divides the human tongue into sections according to taste receptors. There is the tip of the tongue for sweet, the sides for sour and salty, and the back of the tongue for bitter. But recent studies show that while scientists still have much to learn about receptors, the map, at least, is wrong

I had a hard time believing their neat little map in the first place. And I thought it had been disproved some time ago. But the New York Times is making it sound like it is something that they just found out.

I just got done killing and butchering a number of Chickens when I checked my RSS feeder and found that that Gene Logsdon had put up a post on how he does it. I found it interesting to compare how he does it to how we do it.

One things for sure, Gene is faster then we are. He says…

My wife and I can kill, scald, and butcher four chickens in half an hour, if we’re in a hurry.

If he is truly counting all the steps it takes to get them in a freezer and his wife really is as fussy as he says she is, he has got us beat on speed. And to make matters worse, we have a machine to help us with the plucking (ours looks like this, but if I had to get one now I would probably get this).

I suspect that part of the secret to his speed is this…

Theoretically, the water should not be quite boiling—about 180° to 190°F. is just right. But we let the water come to a boil, then let it sit a bit. Our water is usually a bit too hot, and it cooks the skin a wee bit but this is no problem other than the skin might tear in the defeathering process. A bit of torn skin is no catastrophe either, and eventually you will learn to avoid it. I like to start with the water a bit too hot, so that if we are butchering four or more chickens at once, which we usually do, the water will not be too cool by the time we get to the last one. Better too hot than not hot enough.

I find this quick and dirty approach appealing. I am a naturally lazy fellow. But the Troll would kill me if I tried to do my scalding this way. She does not like it when the skin cooks. She says that it affects the taste. Since she can usually tell you all ingredients in a dish just by tasting it I suppose she is probably right. But if you scald the way we do, it takes longer.

We scald the chickens in water that is around 140 degrees. The amount of time we leave the chicken in the water varies with the age of the chicken. But it is generally close to a minute. The skin does not cook and our machine can still pluck the birds clean without breaking the skin. But I think both the scalding and the plucking take longer than if we did it Gene’s way.

Having said that, I suspect that Gene’s real speed advantage lies in the butchering end of things. He saves some internal organs for later eating (which we do not) and he takes the crop out at the front whereas we pull it through. But if anything those differences should make it take longer for Gene to butcher than it does us.

The real trick is the initial cutting to pull the gut sack out. People who don’t have much experience go really slow so as to not cut into the intestine and release all the crap. I imagine Gene can do this part really fast given how many years he has done it.

From National Geographic…

The researchers had expected to find that, the farther away clusters are, the slower they appear to be moving.

Instead, Kashlinsky said, “We found a great surprise.”

The clusters were all moving at the same speed—nearly 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour —and in a single direction.

Though this dark flow was detected only in galaxy clusters, it should apply to every structure in the known universe, Kashlinsky said.