As I Learn It

Honeybees: Nature`s Little Communists, Part 4.

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 11:46:49 -0400

So without too much introduction, let’s continue on from my last post. The only thing that I’d really like to preface with is this: Much of the answer to how honeybees form into a single ‘superorganism’ can be uncovered in discussing why exactly honeybees need to do this. So to begin simply, let’s discuss…

The Purpose of Life

For human beings, the purpose of any given person’s life is variable on so many different levels. Beyond even the obvious eat, sex, die trifecta, there is an enormous range of motivations people have for their lives. Some people live for art, some kill for wealth, others die fighting for Black Friday specials. Who am I to judge?

Now let’s contrast this with the honeybee’s life, which is infinitely more straightforward. Boiled down, a honeybee devotes the vast majority of its existence in supporting its colony’s two most vital endeavors. These are:

1. Staying warm during the cold season.

2. Creating and storing a lot of food during the warm season.

Really, this is it. So why is heat (and through it, honey) so important to bees? Well, if we can ignore for the moment disease and/or any creature that willfully wishes to do harm to bees (chiefly bears or kids with BB guns), a honeybee colony’s chief adversary is cold weather.

Friction Heat and Honey, Where Food Fetishists Totally Got It Right

Winter is a very difficult time for insects. Because they are ectothermic, meaning they lack the ability to create heat internally, during the winter months insects usually do one of two things: hide, or die. There aren’t many options here. A lot of evolutionary progress insects have made toward surviving the winter has been in the ‘hide’ category. Faced with the biting cold, bugs will burrow into trees, huddle together under rocks, bury in the earth, or find other places to hole up (sometimes literally) and go dormant. Some can survive freezing temperatures and just wait to warm up in spring. Others need to keep their body temperature above a certain level. A few even migrate*. Surprisingly (or maybe not, given their spineless nature) most insects have actually adapted to the ‘dying’ strategy. They lay their eggs in a relatively temperate area, hope their progeny will make it into next year, and die. (These are nature’s quitters.)

Now honeybees have a very unique overwintering strategy in that they don’t do any of the things I’ve listed above. Though the colony itself appears to go dormant during the winter months (no bees leave), the individual honeybees themselves are still very much active within their hive throughout the entire year. They are, in fact, one of the very few cold-climate insects that maintain year-round activity. So what exactly are they doing all winter long? In a word: shivering.

…But actually. Though an individual bee isn’t able to regulate its own internal temperature, collectively the honeybee colony can use what entomologists have termed ‘the buddy-system’ to keep one another warm. When a honeybee senses that the hive is a bit too cold for its taste (each bee has a unique tolerance, which causes a kind of cold-response bell curve), it’ll make its way to the brood, latch onto the comb, and repeatedly flex its flight muscles (read:shiver) until it has created enough friction heat to warm up the surrounding comb about one smidgen (technical term). This shiver response, when adopted en masse, ensures not only that the honeybee’s individual temperature never dips low enough to kill it, but also keeps the brood’s temperature between thirty-three to thirty-six degrees centigrade (which is important, but I’ll get to this later).

But here is the catch. Though this mass shivering effort is remarkably effective, it’s also incredibly energy-costly: The shivering bees need a constant influx of honey to keep their efforts going. So here we can see, going back to my introduction to this post, why it is exactly that honeybees need to act collectively as a ‘superorganism’. If a honeybee colony was made up of merely a few thousand self-guided individual units searching blindly for flowers all summer, not a single hive would be able to collect enough food to make it through the winter. Even with their combined and directed effort about ⅓ of all honeybee colonies will, depending on the length and severity of the winter, run out of food before spring shows, and so starve, freeze, then die.

So honeybees need some sort of mechanism to not only direct their collection of food, but to make the effort as efficient as possible as well. They are working against the ever-ticking seasonal clock, and if they fail, they die. (Think Speed, with Keaunu Reeves. Except with more lives at stake.) And so, faced with the prospect of a very real, ever looming specter of death, what do these bees do?

Well, as it turns out, mostly dance.

*Danaus plexippus to the Northern American southwest (Monarch Butterflies), and Oldus americanus to Florida.

Honeybees: Nature`s Little Communists, Part 3.

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:28:00 -0400

Alright, up to this point I’ve tried to focus on the honeybee as a singular organism, ignoring for the moment what is doubtlessly its most interesting feature: the creatures’ social organization and interactions. So lets get to the good part now, let’s talk about the colony.

The Human Organism and the Honeybee Superorganism

One of the most fascinating things about the human body is that we commonly refer to it as a single entity. Actually, better yet, is the fact that we do this despite any and all evidence to the contrary. Though it is fairly common knowledge that really, we are all completely composed of trillions of individual cells (each no more or less ‘alive’ than the entire body), we still manage to go by first and last names.

Maybe because it is the only way we can make our own lives make sense (and also because it is extremely hard to convict a hand, on its own, for theft), but there is usually not much of an argument that somehow, we are each more than the sum of our individual parts. More than just the collective effort of countless, tiny, but distinguishable lifeforms. I am not just separate cells, I am William, a whole entity.

But even though this is hardly ever debated, it is extremely hard to answer how it proves true. How am I more than my clearly living pieces? Usually we just reconcile this oversight by just not thinking about it, but, if we are pushed for an answer, we may discuss the ‘mind’ or some quality of self-awareness. If we’re really stuck, we’ll use the word soul and move the discussion into the realm of theology or philosophy. But in expressing our singular identity, the ‘mind’ arguments don’t explain the various parts of our bodies we very much rely on, but are in many ways completely autonomous and beyond our control (immune system, circulatory system, masturbatory system). And because I am trying to steer clear of any discussion of theology, I will ignore in my questioning the concept of the soul.

Now before I am accused of otherwise, I am not trying to convince you that you, who are currently reading and internalizing this sentence, don’t exist as a ‘person’. I only want to express the fact that there is a bit of a grey area when it comes to the discussion of humans (and all other multi-cellular organisms) as more than the units that they are made up of.

So fine, but why am I bringing this up? Because, and here is where we get back to bees: When we look at Honeybee colonies, we are faced with a similar problem. Yes, we can easily break down the colony into a couple thousand independent bees, but like the problem with breaking me down into cells, we still can not rid ourselves of the fact that their group effort somehow creates an entirely new organism, fully functional and markedly directed. This greater honeybee colony organism though, is what we call a ‘superorganism’, due to the fact that is built up by other multi-cellular organisms (as opposed just single cells), and also because it is a concept widely described within the scientific community as ‘super’.

And when you look carefully, comparing the nature of honeybee colonies and human bodies is actually not all that difficult. In so many ways the honeybee superorganism shares a great deal in common with multi-cellular organisms like humans: The colony has a centralized ‘body’ of a comb, in which it keeps, in constant homeostasis: its temperature (at a creepily near-human thirty-three to thirty-six degrees centigrade), its influx of food and water, and its outflow of waste (that’s pooping, if you didn’t get that). It has mechanisms to defend itself, both from physical attack and infection. It has a relatively low and mammal-like rate of reproduction (how often it breeds new colonies, not bees). But most importantly, the colony is smart: It can, without the understanding of any single bee, properly delegate its workforce efficiently and effectively to manage all of these things simultaneously without over or under-expending its resources. Yes, dumb little bees do this.

So how?

Great question.

Hello! Thanks for an interesting read so-far about bees. I have always loved bees, and finding a paper that can put something in layman terms is always nice.

Anyways, I had a question regarding your second part, and their mating in particular. How can this mating method produce enough variation for natural selection? Do the queens in some way choose what drones to mate with?

Its just that understanding how natural selection works with, say, deer, is clear enough. But what with bees?

Mon, 30 May 2011 23:49:00 -0400

OK, this is a fantastic question. It is also though, jumping the gun a little bit. So please bear with me, as much of this answer might only touch on a couple of topics I‘ll get to and clarify in my next few posts:

Darwin himself confessed utter bafflement in regards to how honeybee colonies fit into his then-unpolished theory of evolution. He may have been quoted saying, “I am baffled, utterly,” or I might have just made that up. Regardless, to Darwin it seemed that he had an entire group of creatures, many of which were completely sterile, that were not only not competing with one another, but were in fact living harmoniously and in many ways altruistically together! Confused and a bit hurt, Darwin may or may not have sat back in his chair and imagined burning down every last beehive he could find.

Naturally, questions arose (one of which you voiced). How can these sterile workers pass on their genes without breeding? Why weren’t they competing with one another? How could they produce fertile offspring (new queens) at such an absurdly low rate? How is there even enough genetic variation in this tactic? “This… this doesn’t make any sense at all,” Darwin may have also not been quoted on saying, while possibly not clearing his entire desk with one angry swipe of his arm. “You fucking bees, you’re ruining my precious theory. I’ll kill you all if I have to!” OK, that he definitely didn’t say, but even still, the point stands. It seemed that the honeybee colony’s existence ran completely contrary to natural selection as it was understood.

The core of the answer to this mystery is essentially the topic of my next post, so excuse me for being brief. The thing is, honeybees only really fit into the process of natural selection on the scale of the colony (as a single entity composed of bees), not necessarily as the individual bees themselves. A colony, because it has divided the labor of its survival (and reproduction) amongst its members, is completely dependent on the individual members survival in turn. (An all for one, one for all type of deal.) The risk of competition within a hive is so great and the results so weakening, that any sort of competition would be sure to lead to the complete death of the whole colony*, and thereby the death of the inciting competitors as well. In short: Bees that fight with one another kill everyone and through that, kill themselves and fail to pass on their fightin’ genes. So that solves the mystery of the peaceful lack of competition, but how is this altruistic behavior passed on to the next generation if the workers are all sterile?

Again, the answer to this question must be viewed on the scale of the colony, not the individual bees. While worker bees have varying levels of relation between themselves (depending on whether or not they share a father), they are all related to their mother/queen by 50%. Because of this, the colony has a definite shared gene-pool, which it is then trying to pass on to the next generation (through the queen). So sterile worker bees pass on their shared genetic material (that they have in common with their queen) to the next generation when their queen creates a new colony for them.

Even though only a fraction of the worker’s genes are sure to make it to that next generation, it is enough to continually propagate this beneficial sterilility and altruistic behavior. This is called kin selection, a process of helping the reproductive success of ones close relatives (who share genes), and honeybees are adamant about sticking to it.

So finally, we come to your question (I will leave the question I didn’t answer for later posts). How is there enough variation within a hive and its gene-pool? Sadly, because of the extreme difficulty of observing the queen’s only mating flight, there is very little known beyond the basics about the actual mating process. What we do know though, is that the queen mates with eight to ten different dudes. That, in itself, is more than enough variation for a range of dynamic and varied progeny. Additionally, and this will be extremely important in my later posts: Based on the temperature which they are raised, genetically similar honeybees express differences in ‘personality’ (how or when they respond to different stimuli). This induces a second level of variation, although not genetic, within the hive.

I hope I answered your question.

*At the very least, it would weaken the colony’s ability to function cohesively, and so over time such a trait would be eliminated.

Honeybees: Nature`s Little Communists, Part 2.

Tue, 24 May 2011 03:35:00 -0400

After a couple of rewrites, I think I’ve found that the most logical way to structure this is to first overview the very basics of an individual honeybee’s biology. I’ll hold off until my next post to zoom a bit out in scope, and do a relatively similar analysis with the entire colony. Even though what I really want to talk about is how honeybees work together, I’ve found that without a really concise examination of the pieces, it’s hard to appreciate the entire puzzle.

(Also, important side note: I’m going to limit my analysis to a single species of honeybee, Apis mellifera, as it is the most common bee used in beekeeping, as well as the most widely disseminated. It is native to the whole of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and was introduced to both the Americas in the 1600’s.)

Alright, let’s ignore for a moment the social aspect of honeybees, and talk about the honeybee as a single creature. I think this is important because before we can discuss (and really even appreciate) the colony as a whole, there is a whole lot to understand about the anatomy, castes, and jobs that are unique to honeybees as a species.

Anatomy: Baby Got Thorax

I’ll be basing this off of the diagram that Irene at http://quatremilliards.tumblr.com/ drew for me. It’s of a female ‘worker’ bee, (I’ll go over the different types of bees later, but the colony consists almost entirely of worker bees who are in charge of all the non-reproductive tasks of the hive) and it’s probably best to keep referencing the diagram.

For centuries biologists have marveled at the peculiar ability of honeybees to ‘get a lot of different shit done really goddamn fast’. And while this may not exactly be how they would have phrased their admiration, there is really no doubt that the individual bee is a seriously industrious motherfucker. It is no surprise then that its anatomy reflects this fact. Highly tweaked and tuned, a honeybee has many unique physical features that allow it to specialize in any one of dozens of different tasks it may be required to undertake. I’ll sub-categorize these features, but note that this is by no means a complete list, just what I think is relevant.

Foraging Features: Honeybees are fairly well adapted at carrying their food and water long distances back to their hive. Their stomachs are sectioned off into a crop (where they store water or nectar for travel, like a horribly creepy pocket) and a midgut, where the actual digestion starts. Honeybees have control over whether or not what they swallow makes it past the crop, and are also able to regurgitate the food stored in their crop on a whim, which makes a fascinating party trick I have yet to master. For carrying pollen they use a different tactic: They wet down the pollen with their saliva, and pack it firmly onto the hairs on their rear legs, where it is securely clustered in a ball.
Heating Features: Honeybees are remarkably good at creating heat, which is actually an exceptionally important aspect of their biology. What they do is isometrically flex (read: shiver) their wing muscles really rapidly, which produces a surprising amount of heat. This both warms them to a point where they are able to fly (bees can’t fly if they are internally cooler than 35 degrees Centigrade) and is also used to raise the temperature of the hive (the hive needs to maintain a very specific internal temperature for a bunch of reasons I’ll get on that later).
Communicative Features: Honeybees have a special gland called the Nasanov’s gland that produces a strong and strangely citrus-scented pheromone (think ‘lemon pledge’ meets farting). This pheromone helps lead other bees to scentless areas (such as bodies of water), and marks the entrance of the hive so amature foragers can find their way back home. Side note: Some of the most important communication done by honeybees is mainly behavioral and not very easily ascertained by focusing on their anatomy. I’ll spend a large time focusing on this in my next blog, but bees mostly communicate through seemingly innocuous interactions and, I kid you not, interpretive dance. Yes, you read that correctly.
Hive Building Features: Fun fact: All insects coat their exoskeleton with a thin layer of wax to keep them from drying out. It’s this reason why bugs look so shiny, and perhaps also why they taste so horrible. Honeybees have adapted this wax-making ability with their wax glands, to produce excess wax when they need it. They chew, heat, and mold this wax to create their comb and hive, though they mix it with a tree resin they collect called propolis (which has both anti-fungal properties and adds structural stability to the comb).
Feeding Features: Bees eat three types of food: Honey (which is a mixture of nectar and their saliva), pollen, and a substance known as ‘royal jelly’. Royal jelly is a very protein- and hormone-rich secretion produced in the hypopharyngeal gland, which is located in the honeybee’s head. So yeah, bees occasionally eat one another’s head juices, although in highly regulated amounts. This stuff is also very important to the bee’s caste system, because eating large amounts of royal jelly in the larval and pupal stage of a bee’s development will turn a normal worker bee into a fabulous queen bee.
Hurty-Stingy Features: Sterile worker bees have adapted ovipositors (egg laying organs) called stings with which they use to attack their enemies (bears, competing hives, rodents, the 13-year-old me that for god knows what reason thought it was a good idea to throw his shoes at a bee hive). This sting is coated with venom from its venom sac, and if you ask the thoroughly retarded 13-year-old me, that stuff hurts.

The Caste System: Workers, Drones, and fabulous, fabulous Queens

Gender, one of the cruxes of the honeybee caste system, means something completely different for bees than it does for humans. All fertilized eggs produce genetically female bees. These bees, depending on how they are fed during their larval and pupal stage, will then either go on to become sterile worker bees, or far less commonly, queen bees. It is unfertilized eggs (which therefore share 100% of their genetic material with their mother) that become male, or drone, honeybees. Let’s do a fairly brief overview of this.

Drone bees: Queen bees can decide, although only during the warm summer months (mating season), to lay a very small percent of their eggs unfertilized. These unfertilized eggs hatch into horndog male drone bees, whose sole focus is on finding and having sex with un-mated virgin queens from other hives. If they’re lucky, and often they aren’t, they’ll have sex once and then immediately die. They do this and… actually that’s it, it’s all they do. They literally serve no other purpose than to fly around hunting for tail. And, in the ultimate bachelor move, they do not even feed themselves. This is actually kind of funny, because when the rest of the colony decides the drones have served their purpose, the colony will simply stop feeding them, and they all die. Ha?
Queen bees: If the old queen dies (or is rendered ‘unfit’), or if the colony is sufficiently large, it will decide as a whole to rear new queen bees. This happens very infrequently, only every one to three years if the old queen is still alive, or immediately if she dies. How the colony rears new queens is by feeding a few (usually three to five) of the newborn female bees a very large amount of royal jelly (the face juice we talked about). Because of the high hormone content of this diet, the pupa and larvae of these soon-to-be queen bees will develop much differently than the otherwise normal worker bees. If the old queen was still alive when the colony started to produce new queens, she will fly off (before the new queens hatch) with two-thirds of the workers and start a new hive. Normally, the first of the queen bees to hatch will attempt to kill off the others and claim the hive for her own, but in cases where the colony is really, really large, she’ll do the same as the old queen and take another fraction of the workers to leave and found another new colony. The next queen to hatch then kills all the others queens and claims the hive for her own. After this whole escapade, the new queen will leave on her only mating flight, where she does it with eight to ten dudes from other colonies. When she comes back, she’s loaded with enough semen for her entire life. And, for the rest of her life, that’s all she does, use this semen to pump out thousands of babies. Side note: The queen, despite her regal name, has absolutely no level of control over the other bees, and is merely pushed around all day as she lays eggs. If, in fact, she at any time becomes injured or is deemed unfit to continue having children, the other bees will simply ignore her completely, and she will die of starvation as she watches the hive breed her replacement. Pretty cold, huh?
Worker Bees: These are the backbone of the entire bee economy and workforce. Because they are in charge of and do everything non-reproductive in the hive, they’re pretty much what I’ll be talking about for the entire rest of my blog. Because of this, I’ll move straight into the different jobs a honeybee has during its lifetime, because I’m essentially only referencing the worker bees.

Various Jobs: Odd, Hand, and Others

So, to finish up this blog, let me do a very brief overview of the different areas where a colony has to allocate its workforce. I’d to take this moment to note that honeybees have an extremely strong correlation between their age and their current vocation. For example, usually only the oldest of the bees will engage in foraging, and usually only the youngest will engage in taking care of the brood (larvae and pupae). This though, is flexible, and in the case of a sudden and large extermination of the workforce*, the colony will regulate itself back into proper homeostasis.

So, at any given point, a single honeybee may be engaged in one of these various different activities. How these jobs are efficiently allocated though, I will leave to explain in future posts. For now I just want to give a feeling for the vast range of jobs a single bee may undertake. Here is only a partial list of what a honeybee may be required to do:

Clean out the old cells of the honeycomb for new eggs or honey and pollen storage.
Take care of and feed the brood (larvae and pupae honeybees that are still confined in cells).
Tend and clean the queen bee.
Feed and groom fellow nest-mate bees.
Keep the brood area of the comb constantly between 33 and 36 degrees Celsius (cool and heat).
Build and shape more of the comb.
Forage for nectar, pollen, water, and tree sap (this is a huge one).
Inform other bees about nectar and pollen forage sites.
Patrol and guard the hive.
Store nectar and pollen in the comb.
Lay eggs (this one is for the queen only).
Be fabulous (this one is for queens as well, but may extend beyond bees).

And this is only a partial list. Even still, it’s quite obvious that much like a man reading dirty magazines at the office, these little honeybees are definitely hard at work. But what this list doesn’t fully explain is how precisely these jobs are allocated. Somehow the bees seem to never extend more resources than are required, and maintain a constant balance between deciding which workers should be doing each activity. The level of efficiency in this allocation is absolutely mind-blowing, as is the fact that it’s done completely without a centralized intelligence.

If I’ve done my work, this should lead you to ask some questions, chiefly: Well how the hell do they do that?

And that’s a damn good question.

* See Tom Seeley’s book: The Researcher’s Baseball Bat; How Bees Maintain A Balance Even In The Face of My Iron-Armed Adversity.

I’d like to give an earnest and sincere thank you to Irene, a...

Mon, 23 May 2011 18:32:00 -0400

I’d like to give an earnest and sincere thank you to Irene, a fantastic artist and fellow science lover who runs a blog at http://quatremilliards.tumblr.com. I recently found her blog and commissioned (read: she did it for free) this anatomical diagram of a honeybee (Apis mellifera). It highlights a couple of key features I’d like to bring up, and I think it’s goddamn fantastic. It’s people like her that make it quite difficult to maintain a misanthropic attitude, so give her blog a look!

Honeybees: Nature`s Little Communists, Part 1.

Sat, 14 May 2011 17:30:00 -0400

In this blog, much like in my last, I’d like to stick with basic biology and physiology. Although, instead of continuing to discuss humans, I’d like to take a step sideways on the evolutionary tree, and steal a quick glance at one of our most complex neighbors. Perhaps also one of our most important. And stingy. Definitely stingy. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking bees, bitches. Honeybees.

What I’m about to cover in this blog is a decent overview of social organization of a honeybee colony: How they manage to communicate, organize, and allocate resources to essentially a countless amount of different operations (all without any sort of leader) with a mind-blowingly high level of economy and accuracy. As I discuss this, I’ll also have to try to reconcile the fact that really, despite their brilliant group behaviour, they are still simply a collection of near-mindless idiots.* Not one of the bees has even the slightest idea what it is achieving, and they also lack the abilities to both read literature or poach an egg.

So, this is going to require a serious bit of back and fourth between examining the actions of the single organism working on its own, and the collective efforts of the colony. First though, I’m going to need to quickly overview the life of a bee and it’s hive. I’d also like to discuss for a bit the importance of the honeybee itself in our ecosystem, how this possibly could have evolved, and finally, what we can learn from this complex organizational system of autonomous units. Oh, and why honey burns so bad when you put it in your eye.

I’ll be taking my facts from three books I read on the subject, Tom Seeley’s The Wisdom of the Hive, and Honeybee Democracy, and a translation of Jürgen Tautz’s ‘Honeybee Phenomenon’. Fantastic books, I highly recommend the second one by Seeley, he’s a great writer, loves his research, and it comes through in the book. So let’s get started, shall we?

How Nature Gets Its Game On

I think in this first part in my blog on honeybees, I’ll just start with some evolutionary history. I’ll work on a primer/overview of the bee’s anatomy and physiology in my next blog.

The modern honeybee’s life is so unextractably interconnected with the flowers it resides around, that to fail to include them in a description of the bee’s evolution would be remiss. It is no coincidence that we find the first evidence of primitive bees about 100 million years ago, roughly the middle of the Cretaceous period, when flowering plants (angiosperms) started to become widespread and replace cone-bearing trees (conifers) as the dominant flora on earth. Actually, the rise of angiosperms is really an interesting tale, as these plants managed to biologically and physically mold the face of the earth very rapidly, but not without a bit of help:

The forebears of flowering plants, gymnosperms (such as the majestic redwood), had an incredibly difficult time having sex with one another. Since both partners were hopelessly immobile, (unlike in humans, where only one person is completely motionless) they relied on producing an incredibly costly amount of pollen and tossing it into the air, just hoping that some of it would be carried by the wind and impregnate someone somewhere. And though often it would, the process took a lot of energy and co-operation. And an unbelievable amount of pollen. Ever get allergies? That’s from this effort.

So, a long time passed, but slowly a second method was devised. The flora got together to discuss the matter, and after much deliberation and evolution, finally decided that instead of ejaculating wildly into the air all spring, why couldn’t they just hire some animals to do their fucking for them?

Insects, birds, and all other manner of animals interested in this new, profitable type of sex-trade were delegated for this new type of pollination, with the promise that: As long as stamens would be rubbed, and anthers gently fondled, these animals would be fed like kings. The plants devised incredibly sweet substance for this purpose (nectar), and even allowed some of the pollen or even bits of the flower to be eaten as payment (read: gentle masochism).

And this method, though odd, delicate, and reliant on a third-parties cooperation, was found to be both radically effective, and evolutionarily titillating. Suddenly, seemingly everyone was doing it. Animals became very competitive over this new source of food and energy, and slowly these flower plants were allowed to become fickle, even choosey over who they let ‘tap that’ nectar. Over time, one such animal started to prove its worth in this regard. Taking only pollen and the sweet nectar made for this purpose, this animal promised to harm no flower and pollinate a very high amount of a single species (as trying to pollinate two different species of flowers yields nothing) very rapidly. Many of flowers liked this very much, and soon they too were competing, this time amongst one another for the affections of this mysteriously effective lover. They changed shape, started wearing intense perfumes, even painted their faces a bit.

This animal is the honeybee, and it is a total playa’.

*Any child with a mason jar knows that the individual bee is easily foiled, and almost as dumb an animal as the child itself.

Our Sexy Senses, Part 4.

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:07:00 -0400

So last I left off, I expressed this single completely absurd, but totally factual claim: That our visual perception is an interpretation of a reality far different than we naturally perceive. In actuality, the universe around us is void of both color and any ‘solid’ appearance we associate with it. Neither of those qualities exist outside our own minds.

And again, we know this to be true because:

Color is an mental interpretation of an arbitrary section of electromagnetic radiation, and
The vast, vast majority of our everyday universe consists of empty space barely freckled with tiny bits of matter. We don’t actively register this because what we ‘see’ is the energy being radiated off of that matter.

(Side note: I could try to make an even bolder claim at this point, and start on how our perception of reality as innately ‘three dimensional’ can be called into question as well. But really, I think that would be totally superfluous right now. All I want to do is to plant the seed of doubt that reality as we see it may not be accurate to how it ‘really’ is.)

So at this point, if you have any shred of sense in you, you’re going to want to start to kick and buck at this idea. I mean, how can you not? This sounds completely crazy. Everything around you is barely a pinch of physical matter? The reality is that our lives are almost entirely empty space?

How can that be? Even if vision is in question, we still feel that things are whole. If the objects around me aren’t really as ‘solid’ as I see them, why can I still pick them up? How do I touch them?

Great questions, me. The short answer: Magic. The long answer:

Touch

Anyone who has ever spent a day at the zoo can claim that they have experienced the seemingly awe-inspiring power of physical touch. Spend more than twenty minutes in front of the thinly-veiled and glorified masturbatorium they call the primate exhibit, and you know that there is something is going on in there. And, in fact, there is. As those sweaty little monkeys wail away with a ferocity and single-mindedness rarely seen outside of the realm of cage-fighting or professional tennis, they are experiencing (first-hand) one of our most important senses in what is possibly its most powerful avenue.

Touch is, perhaps, our most vital sense. The associated mortality rate among people with Peripheral Neuropathy (those who lack the sense of touch, or ‘no-feelies’, as I am now nicknaming them), is far higher than with any other sensorily deprived group. You need to feel things to survive. It’s the most basic form of learning. It’s how we learn what’s going to burn or stab us. Or both.

I mean, think of the difficulty you already face every morning when you turn on the shower. As you barely, just barely, adjust that shower-nob, the water seems to alternately sway in between bone-chilling ice-rain and boiling firewater. And even when you have it barely balanced on an acceptable temperature, you better just pray nobody flushes a toilet, or you don’t hit that knob accidentally with your back.*

So now imagine trying to adjust that fickle bitch shower without even feeling it. What are you going to do? Guesswork? Good luck, you’ll freeze or burn! If you’re smart enough you’ll just skip it. But though you’ve passed up the shower, you’ll still need to shave your face, right? So, what, you’re going to put a razor to your neck without knowing how hard you’re pressing? That’s suicide. So now you‘re living your life in a dirty, hairy mess until one day a car mistakes you for a piece of smelly trash and boom. You don’t even feel it. This is exactly how it happens.

Or at least that’s how I imagine it. OK, back on track. If I haven’t driven the point hard enough, I just want to state that touch is important. But, much like our other senses, I’d also like to argue that it’s entirely deceiving as well.

So, lets do a little experiment, you and I. I want you to touch something. No, not that, that’s not what we’re here for. Try a desk, or your computer-screen. Something inanimate and solid. Seriously, do it, the blog will wait.

OK, did you note that you’re hand did not go through the object? It stopped, and you felt the pressure of your touch, and the object had a texture and everything. It was whole, like you’d expect, right? I mean, if what you were touching were 99.999999999% empty space (like I argued) wouldn’t your hand pass right through as if you were swiping through a thin mist? So it has to be solid, right?

Wrong. The thing is, at no point did you actually physically touch whatever object you found. In fact, you never actually ‘touch’ anything, in the sense of making physical contact. There is always a extremely small, but very real gap of empty space in between your hand and everything around you. What you registered as the sensation of pressure was not the object, but the electrical repulsive force being emitted by it.

It works like this, and I’ll keep it simple: All atoms have a coat of negatively charged electrons surrounding them, and like magnets, they produce an extremely strong force repelling one another due to their same charges (that’s our electrical repulsive force). So when the atoms in your hand get close enough to the thing you appear to be touching, really it’s just this electrical force keeping your hand’s atoms from going any further. The sensation of pressure and texture is really the nerves in your fingers registering a repulsive force of electricity, not a piece of physical matter. And so touch, just like hearing and sight, is absurdly deceptive in its real nature. You don’t ‘touch’ something, you get close enough where it electrically repels you, and then you feel that.

And that’s it, that’s how we can feel the infinitesimally small array of matter in our universe as the very ‘real’ and solid world around us. Matter can be an extremely tiny part of the fabric of our universe and still feel solid because we only register the repulsive force of electricity from these small flecks, not the physical flecks them-self.

So that’s it. That’s the end of my series on sensory perception. I’ve explained all I wanted to, straight from the book, which again, is Biocentrism, by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. (Again, read the book, it has so much more than what I wrote about.) And though I’ve said all I wanted, I would like to leave on this last comment:

In the end, it’s our own minds that create this intense and vivid interpretation of a world that is just barely there. We hear its vibrations, see its energy radiation, and touch its electrical forces. And then, we take all this information, this data from these faint specks of matter, and we unknowingly string it together in a way so real, so seemingly sincere, that it could have keep us fooled for eons, had not one person looked around him and thought, “Yeah, but how?”

*I fucking hate showers.

Our Sexy Senses, (Part 2 Revision!):

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:54:00 -0400

Really, I’m surprised it took me a whole three posts before I ruined science.* Frankly I was aiming for two posts, and to be completely honest, a part of me was really wishing I could do it in one. But no, it was my third post (Our Sexy Senses; Part 2) where I started to describe real phenomenon inaccurately. I said something wrong. So, in short, I need to take a step back and revise something I said about the mechanics of sight:

In my attempt to simplify the description of how light and other EM radiation is emitted and absorbed, I made an slight error. I falsely oversimplified the concept, to a point where what I said is just flat-out untrue.

So here comes the red pen. I ‘explained’ this:

When light and other forms of EM radiation are energetically expelled into our surrounding environment, atoms and molecules in the environment absorb this radiation, re-emit it (at specific wavelengths, depending on what types of atoms or molecules we’re talking about), and when that re-emission hits our eyes, we register it as light and divide the specific wavelengths into colors.

So if I can just apply a few gentle correcting touches, we’ll have this:

When light and other forms of EM radiation are energetically expelled into our surrounding environment, atoms and molecules in the environment absorb this radiation, re-emit it (at specific wavelengths, depending on what types of atoms or molecules we’re talking about), and when that remission hits our eyes, we register it as light and divide the specific wavelengths into colors. These colors glue together in the form of rainbows, where they then are absorbed through the skin, keep you from playing sports, and make you gay.

Yes. That’s right. Just forget all of it. It’s wrong at a fundamental level. The reality is a bit different; once light is emitted from an light-energetic source (like a light-bulb), an object will absorb some of the wavelengths of that light and reflect/bounce the rest back. Not, like I stated, absorb all of them and re-emit them. What we see is reflected light that was not absorbed, as apposed to the direct emission of the light. (Unless you are staring straight at the source.)

So when you see something bright red, like a banana, maybe one that has been painted bright red, you only ‘see’ it as red is because: The paint covered banana itself absorbed all the wavelengths of light except for those in the EM spectrum that you register as red. The banana then reflected ‘red’ light back into the environment where it hit your eyes and made you question your choice in supermarkets. So in the end, and much like my senior prom, what we end up seeing is EM Radiation and girls that have been rejected by all else in our surrounding environment. (Again, unless we are staring straight at the light source.)

Along this vein: Something that appears white will have absorbed relatively little EM radiation in the visible light scale, and will have reflected the entire light-spectrum back (If you remember your color wheel, white is the combination of all colors). And something that appears black will have done the opposite. It will have absorbed almost all the light, reflecting very little back. This is an extremely important concept for people who professionally work with dividing colors: mostly Kindergartners and Republican Politicians.

OK, now that I cleared that up, I’d like to make a final point. I titled this blog “As I Learn It,” and at its core it’s really an experiment in my ability to simplify and describe what I have just learned. So despite my best efforts, I’m going to say something incorrect things from time to time. But this I will celebrate! Because finding yourself knee-deep in wrong-as-shit is one of the most informative parts of learning! So like I just did, I’m going to need to amend the incorrect things I am bound to say. And while I will be doing my best to check my own factuality, please feel free to make frequent use of the ASK button at the top of the page if you catch me before I do.

Alright, now let’s finish up this series with Touch!

*This is why I can’t have nice things.

when will you be covering how love works?

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 18:06:00 -0500

If I could answer that with any degree of certainty, I certainly would.

I’m trying to cover only scientific principles and concepts that don’t require any guesswork of my own. I want to just explain the intellectual achievements of others and draw only straightforward conclusions from them.

Our Sexy Senses, Part 3.

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:36:00 -0500

I’m going to spend most of this building upon my last post about sight. With that in mind, it’ll probably be a good idea to sum up some key points I made.

What we ‘see’ is electromagnetic energy (in the form of light) being radiated from an object, not the object itself.
Other than energy level (which manifests in frequency/jiggliness), there is no physical difference between light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation (such as radio waves, X-rays, ultraviolet waves, ect.)
The human brain interprets different frequencies of light as different colors. Color is not something that exists outside the human mind.
Dolphins can communicate through complex whistles and are very intelligent. Friendly too!

So now that we have that covered, let’s move along. One of the new points about sight that I’d like to make requires a bit of background in simple atomic structure. It’s nothing too complicated, but the concept itself will go against everything you thought you understood about the world around you. No, really.

Fairly bold claim, right? Especially considering it’s about:

Empty Space

To talk about nothingness, we have to start small. Actually, small and hairy. I mean of course, that we’re going to have to start with Greek people. (But not the too-loud modern ones that can’t balance a checkbook, no, for this we’re going to need a throwback.) We’re going to need their greying and brainy predecessors, the Ancient Greeks*. A society perhaps best known for its astounding contributions to the fields of mathematics, general science, philosophy, and fat weddings.

The ancient Greeks found (read: guessed) that physical matter could only be divided so many times before it simply could no longer be broken up. “Surely Thopolopogus,” one of them most likely said, “I could only halve this rock so many times!” As a society, they considered this a fair call, and so they called such an elemental state “átomos,” (a word from which we derive our term ‘atom’) and called it a day. While they were right (luck), they also thought that the atomic elemental states were composed of like, fire, and water, and other ridiculous things like that, so feel free to scoff at them.

The reality is much more complicated. We modern humans know that really, atoms break down into 117 known elements (gold, helium, more gold, ect.) which are themselves actually made up of even smaller particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) and some of those are made up of even smaller sub-particles (quarks, gluons, johnstamosons, ect.) So like I said, it’s complicated, but luckily enough for us, we don’t need to know a lot of that right now. For all our intents and purposes, we just need to know that on an extremely small scale, almost every piece of known matter can be broken down into atoms that are (for our general purposes) shaped very similarly.

They are shaped like this: A small core of tiny pieces of matter (protons and neutrons) that is orbited by one or more even tinier pieces of matter (elections). For most people, this is nothing new, you’ve either heard about this in a science class or seen a drawing of an atom at some point during your life. One could imagine that an atom looks a lot like the earth being orbited by the moon. But here is the important aspect of the atomic structure I want to highlight: It’s not necessarily the shape I want to focus on, it the scale of the damn thing.

The ratio of physical matter to empty space within an atom is unbelievably small. There is hardly any physical mass in an atom. I could use numbers to describe this, and I will in a moment, but just for perspective let’s view this in good ol’ fashioned American terms. If I blew an atom up to the size of a football-field, do you know how big the nucleus of it would be? The size of a fly. And the electron zooming around it? Unviewable still. And the numbers? An atom is 99.9999999999999% empty space, and yes, that is the exact number of nines.

And here is the part that still blows my mind: Though an atom is almost completely empty space, that’s absolutely nothing when compared to the amount of dead nothingness between atoms (even ones that are relatively tightly compacted). A group of atoms is essentially a vast expanse of nothingness with only a few tiny flecks of mass. And when you add in what we, on the macro-scale, consider to be considerable gaps of empty space, I cant even begin to describe how little physical matter is there.

The reality is that there is an absurdly small amount of physical matter surrounding us, so little that it’s almost negligible. Far, far less than .0000000000000000000000000000001% (that one I did just add zeros at random, but trust me it’s way less than what I even wrote.) So what does this have to do with the sensory perception, what does this have to do with sight? Well, simply put, if there is almost no mass in the universe, why do I see shit? Look around where you are right now, do you see things? See a computer? Looks like it’s there, right?

It is, but just barely. That computer is almost absolute nothingness with hardly a skeleton frame of flecks of physical matter. So again, then why do I see things if they’re barely there? Well, this takes us right back to the first key point I made at the top of this post. Go back and reread it. Simply restated, we don’t ‘see’ objects, we see their energy radiation. The reality is, that if you could see physical objects in their true nature, there would just be nothing to see, just a blank expanse of colorless (remember key point number 3, color is an interpretation of frequency and doesn’t exist outside our minds) and empty nothingness. What you see is the energy being radiated off these slight flecks of matter, and your mind (also composed in the same way) figured this together into an image that couldn’t be less true to reality. You see something that looks whole, but it isn’t.

So well, that’s a hell of a thing? Now let me state, because I’m sure this is starting to sound like pseudo-science, that there is not a single bit of what I’m saying that is in the least contested by any actual scientist. Most of our existence is empty air, and we don’t register that because our visual perception is an interpretation of EM radiation, not an objective view of reality. It’s fact.

So here is a question. If most existence is empty space, why can I feel things? Oh! Good question, especially because the last part of this series is on Touch!

*The first society completely run by nerds.

Our Sexy Senses, Part 2.

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:35:00 -0500

So, before I embark my explanation of this absurd miracle we call ‘sight’, I’d like to make a quick aside. It will only take a second, and I think it’s fairly important. It’s this:

I want to note that I’ll be using all of my personal restraint to not spend this entire blog making fun of the blind. While far too easy, I’d like to set an example and show that I’m mature enough to look beyond such mean-spirited jokes. Strong enough to even see past this potential comic goldmine. In fact, I want the entire blind community to know that I am watching over them, and that I have a vision: That one day, we will all be able to gaze over our differences and view one another through the lens of personal character, not on how poorly we function in a game of dodge-ball.

I see this vision with perfect 20/20, blind-people. And I hope you know, that if anyone is behind you and your strange, bat-like society of sightless humanoids, it is me, blind-people, it is me.

People with glasses though, oh man, you guys are in for it.

Sight

Physical sight is, arguably, the sense we rely on the most.* And while some of us can and do lead what could hesitantly be called full and meaningful lives without it, (I’m looking at you blind-people!) try taking away somebody’s glasses.

Watch how weak and disoriented they become. In fact, stare them down as they feebly grasp at the empty air around them, all the while discovering first-hand the sharp corners of our collective, three-dimensional world. Pity them for this genetic, or age-induced weakness. But as you do, realize that you too could become like this, in the event of a night-time power-outage or during a riveting game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Reflect on how much easier living is with your fantastic ability to see things, and realize how much different existence could be without sight. And when you’re done, and you understand all this, give back the glasses you took, because you’re being kind of an asshole.

What is odd then, for something we rely on so much, is how principally deceiving it is. Much like my conclusion on hearing, I’d like to show that the fundamentals of sight (color, solid appearance, and more) are largely a fallacy of our own minds.

Generally, we tend to think of our eyes as windows, things with which we view the untainted natural word around us. When we look at something, let’s say a crying baby, one that we are shaking uncontrollably, we believe that we are beholding the physical, crying object in its entirety. Objectively, what we are seeing is purely the baby itself.

This though, is perhaps the biggest misconception we can hold about our sense of sight. We never actually ‘see’ an object on its own, rather, what we register is the physical energy (in the form of photons) being produced by it. In reality, energy radiation is all we ever ‘see’, nothing more, and the implications of this are phenomenal. But before we get to them, lets first go over the physical process of sight itself.

We’ll start small. Literally. The basic components of matter, atoms, are constantly transferring and radiating energy. This radiant energy is commonly referred to as electromagnetic radiation, and we refer to a single particle of this energy as a photon.

Though we only register a small portion of it, everything around you is radiating electromagnetic energy almost all the time. Light, radio-waves, microwaves, x-rays, and a host of other waves are all types of this electromagnetic radiation. They are simply energy that is emitted by atoms and, with only one exception, they are all exactly the same. The only difference between types of electromagnetic radiation (which will henceforth be called EM radiation) is they they can differ in frequency, which is simply the rate at which they jiggle.

The higher/faster the frequency/jiggliness (Scientific term? It is now.) of a particle of EM radiation, the more energetic it is. So while a very high-energy stream of EM radiation, such as a beam of gamma rays, can rip through your face with its energy level, very low-energy streams like radio-waves, are harmless. They can only remind you how old you are because who still uses the radio? (Nice try Sirius radio, but I think we’ll be able to see the Kaiser’s incoming zeppelins without your help.) I also want to restate that we are constantly surrounded by an entire spectrum of relatively low-energy EM-radiation (not the face ripping kind), because as I said, that stuff is being emitted/transferred by atoms all the time.

Now that we understand EM radiation, let’s talk about an extremely small portion of it. Hell, let’s talk about the section of EM radiation that has a frequency between 400 to 790 terahertz. Why? Because we call this section visible light, and it is essentially a completely arbitrary fragment of the entire spectrum of EM radiation. The only thing that differentiates light from the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum is us.

Though, by ‘us’, I mean of course the 8 million cone shaped cells in the human retina. Depending on the jiggliness of the incoming light, (though still within our seductive 400-790 terahertz sweet spot) different cones in the retina will be stimulated, each of which are tuned to interpret different frequencies as different colors. These cones will send a corresponding electrical impulse to the occipital-lobe of the brain, where boom, we create a mental picture. Everything you ‘see’ is an interpretation of an arbitrary slice of radiation, which the mind magically color-codes based on jiggliness.

In action, the entire process works like this: Say it’s dark in your bedroom, (in scientific terms, that the room is radiating a negligible amount EM radiation within the visible-light spectrum), and you’d like to, well, see things. So you turn on a light-bulb. The now energetic light-bulb expels and saturates the entire room with a whole range of EM radiation, including visible light. The furniture and whatnot within the room thereby absorb this radiation,and transfer it back into open space. (Depending on the structure of the atoms and molecules in the furniture, different frequencies of light are transferred back during this process i.e. different colors) Some of the radiation that is reflected back into open space will fall upon our eyes. If the radiation is within our arbitrary spectrum, it will stimulate the rods in our retinas. Our eyes then transfer the information of which cone was stimulated and where, to our brain, which color-codes this information and assembles it as a picture. This happens hundreds of times per second, and when strung together, these pictures make the movie-reel style sensation of sight.

And this is absolutely insane for dozens of different reasons, but I’ll get to that in my next post.

*This claim is not based on hard, scientific fact, but try driving blindfolded. That shit is tough.

Our Sexy Senses, Part 1.

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:10:00 -0500

(I will be taking the bulk of the factual information in the following blog from a book. Normally it would be a text, but in this case it is Biocentrism, by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. It’s quite interesting, and I highly suggest that you read it. I am stealing nothing from it but the hard science, a process I assume is legal. I’m kind of banking on ‘legal’ right now.)

Alright Science, let’s start with something personal. Let’s talk about our feelings.

And by that, I mean our sensory perception.

Our Sexy Senses, Part 1.

So our senses, the physical processes which reveal what our existence looks, sounds, feels, smells, and tastes like. The tools we use every second to find food and water, recognize danger, navigate, watch cable television, and decipher if or when we’re on fire.

As any blind person knows, these senses are very important. They’re the only connections we have to anything outside our bodies, and they are also, as I will explain, far more complex and illusionary than we ever give them credit for. So lets start!

For the most part we, as human beings, have five specific senses. Touch, hearing, sight, smell and taste*. For brevity’s sake, I will discuss only the first three, hearing, sight, and touch.

Hearing

As a general rule, we hear things. Be it language, music, or the disappointed scoldings of our loved ones, we are constantly surrounded by sound. But how does it work, and what physical process does our body go through to register sound? Great question William, lets find out.

First off, sound can be defined as ‘the disturbance or vibration of a medium’. In even simpler terms, sound is the movement of a medium. (The specific medium can be anything: air, water, steel, or the absurdly thin drywall separating you from the frantic humpings of your neighbors.) Any sound we hear is simply vibrations around us, and if it is energetic enough (think rock-concert) we can even readily feel it through our skin.

Side note: Because sound is only the motion of a medium, without a medium, such as in space, there is no sound at all. In space, there is nothing to be vibrated, which is one reason why we cant hear angels, and why a space-concert would be a horrible waste of money.

So when someone speaks to us, back here on earth, all they are doing is vibrating the air around them. They send out tiny pulsations of wind from their mouth, which hit our ears. These vibrations then move through our ears and vibrate against the sensitive membrane of skin we call our eardrums.

It’s here on the eardrum that the magic of hearing happens. Sound has no intrinsic property beyond being a puff of air, it’s just a vibration. But when our eardrum vibrates with sound, the information of that vibration is transferred to the brain, where the temporal lobe interprets it, based on its size and rate of movement, as a noise.

There is a key difference I want to make about noises and sounds. Sounds are the movements of air around us, and noises are our brain’s interpretation of those sounds.

So why am I making this differentiation? Two reasons.

Sounds are all the pulsations and vibrations around you. Noises are just a very small subset of these sounds. You will only ‘hear’ a sound in the air around you if it is pulsating at 20 to 20,000 vibrations per second. Anything vibrating faster or slower than that you will not hear. In fact, as you age, to lets say at age 40, the upper limit of the sounds you can hear drops off to around 10,000 vibrations a second. Different animals also have different ranges of sounds they can hear. Dogs can hear whistles at a much higher frequency (vibration rate) than people. Likewise, whales can hear much lower frequencies, such as the deep-sea drills that we consider silent. This makes them sad, and their tears are why the ocean is so salty. Back to my point though. Because there are sounds we can and can not hear, noises are just a small, random subset of sounds.
The second reason I am making a delineation between noises and sounds is because I would like to emphasize this: Noises only exist inside our own heads. Until you hear something, all it exists as is a puff of air in your surrounding environment. Hearing is the process of transferring information from your eardrum to the temporal lobe of your brain, where it is then interpreted. So it is only when you ‘hear’ these vibrations that your brain registers them as noises like clapping, music, speech, gunfire, screaming, or more gunfire and whatever. Before you hear something, all it is is a vibration hanging in the air.

So ‘Hearing’ as a sense, is not only the registration of just a small subset of all sounds/vibrations, but it is also the mental interpretation and creation of ‘noises’.

Example: When you sit in your car, with the music at top volume, all that is happening outside of your own head is that the car’s speakers are rhythmically pulsating the air at specific frequencies, creating a very specific stream of air-puffs. There is no music in that car, no fat baseline, no rocking guitar solo, just noiseless puffs of air. Free Bird flies free only in your head.

The point I want to make is that your brain is a liar. A dirty liar. Though we don’t actively register this, noises are not something that exist in the outside world. They are a creation of your own mind. Your sense of hearing is no more ‘real’, than lets say… the random colors in your eyes when you press your eyes really hard with your thumbs. They’re a mental creation.

Actually, while we’re on the topic. Press your thumbs into your closed eyes. Just do it. Don’t think about it, do it. Experience them colors. Because our next sense is Sight!

* Some of us have a rare ‘sixth sense’, but this sense is scarce, and limited to only a handful of chosen people (Bruce Willis), so we will ignore it.

An Introduction

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 16:20:00 -0500

The idea for this blog has been in my head for quite a while now. And, like all potentially bad ideas, it started as a series of questions of the ‘why not?’ variety. Simply put, they were these:

1. Why not write a blog explaining the fundamental principles of as many of the branches of science as I could tackle?

2. And why not do it in a way that would be easily accessible and engaging to the nonscientist?

3. And why not try to make it funny?

Yes, why not?

Well if I did, I’d have a hell of a thing, I concluded. I mean, really why not? After all, what could be easier than to fundamentally break down, order, explain, and humorize thousands of years of human achievement?

And who better to do it, than me, William Herkewitz? A 21 year old college graduate with a bachelors in English literature, and only the most basic understanding of the sciences.

Maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit. Over the last year, I’ve read a few theoretical science books, mostly on math and physics, which have been marketed specifically toward people like me: ‘Laymen’, people with the interest, but almost none of the education. And what I’ve found so far as been both fascinating and endlessly hilarious. And despite my limited knowledge, I find myself talking about what I have recently read with little to no insistence, and sometimes even despite moderate resistance.

I’ve come to realize that in humanity’s search for the big answers: Who are we, why are we here, how does it all work, why does this make me so gassy? All these desperate scrambles for answers have come up with some of the most interesting stories, far fetched theories, and brilliant insights.

They’re absurd. They’re funny. And I want to know more. So here is what I am going to do:

Going along with the blog’s title, I’m going to write what I learn, as I learn it. I’m going to study and decipher the sciences to the best of my ability, and in some crude pattern write down the explanation and summaries of what I have most recently learned. I’ll teach straight out of my books, stick to the scientific method, and give credit where credit is due. I’ll do my best to be accurate and concise, without sacrificing the factuality of the subject, and then I’ll make dick jokes, but not really.

So let’s see how this goes!

-William Herkewitz