All Roads Lead to Rome
Etymological Vaginas
Hemoglobin and Alchemy
Fish Milk
You Are What You Eat
Hobson Jobson
Has anyone ever read this book?
The Waters Under the Firmament
Bottle and Potato Traced to the Source
 

All Roads Lead to Rome

Turkey wiki
Online etymology of English "turkey"
Linguist List on the names of the turkey
 

Etymological Vaginas

Puss caterpillar: a horrible fuzzy caterpillar

Dauzat's Dictionnaire Étymologique, 1938.
Hobson-Jobson, Col. Henry Yule, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi,1903 / 1968.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition.

Oxford English Dictionary, first and second editions.

Pelliot, Paul, Notes on Marco Polo, Paris, 1963 (#317, porcelain).

Hemoglobin and Alchemy

Much more information

The origin of this piece:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000566.html

Hemerythrin / Bristleworms / Chlorocruorins./ Ascidian tunicates / Chlorophyll / Hemoglobin / Chlorophyll / Hemoglobin / Heme / Icefish  

Chlorophyll performs almost the same function as Cytochrome c, absorbing light to produce two high-energy electrons, which are transmitted through an electron transfer chain to produce useful energy for the cell. Hemoglobin's function is also related: it carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues by using heme to bind two electrons which happen to be attached to the oxygen molecule. So chlorophyll and hemoglobin represent new ways for organisms to use old materials. (Source) 
 

The iron-porphyrin in hemoglobin accounts for the red color of blood, and the magnesium-porphyrin in chlorophyll is responsible for the green of plants. (Source)
 

The [icefish] blood is opalescent whitish gray in color.  (Cf. Poe's "Arthur Gordon Pym"):

http://www.gma.org/onlocation/Antarctica/batch1.html
 

How the icefish without hemoglobin AND myoglobin able to survive the harsh Antarctic environment remains unknown.

http://www.gma.org/onlocation/past.html
 

Antarctic hemoglobin situation:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=21134
 

Search "fish" for icefish:

http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/antarct/treaty/projsum01/html/bio&med.html
 

Everything you ever wanted to know about oxygen transport:

http://www.usd.edu/biol/faculty/swanson/ecophys/readings/Oxygen.html
 

More on chlorocruorins:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11178954&dopt=Abstract
 

Ruthenium and cytochrome-c:

http://www.worldandi.com/public/1993/february/ns7.cfm

Fish Milk

Pigeons and miscellaneous:

Thus three very different groups of birds have evolved the capacity to produce milk as solutions to very different problems: the need for protein and fat in the pigeons, which feed very little animal material to the squabs; the need for liquid food consumption during the development of the specialized feeding apparatus of the flamingos (which would make any other form of food difficult for the chicks to ingest); and the need for a convenient food supplement when breeding on the barren Antarctic ice shelf favored by penguins.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Bird_Milk.html

Crop-milk production allows the rapid production of multiple broods in a nesting season, but only one or two young per brood:

http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Wilson/v101n01/p0011-p0025.pdf

Like mammalian colostrum, crop milk gives resistance to disease:

http://www.albertaclassic.com/adenovirus.php

Recipe for fake crop milk:

http://www.internationaldovesociety.com/Recipes/macmilk.htm

Everything you want to know about the intestinal tract of birds:

http://www.nhahonline.com/bird_digestion.htm

Bird digestion in great detail:

http://www.biology.eku.edu/RITCHISO/birddigestion.html

Many PubMed articles on crop milk (pay site):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Search&db=PubMed&term=+%22crop+milk%22+&tool=QuerySuggestion

Flamingos

Quick flamingo sketch:

http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-flamingo.html

Flamingo traits in detail:

http://spot.colorado.edu/~humphrey/fact%20sheets/flamingo_caribbean/flamingo.htm

Flamingo chicks are unable to filter-feed until they are three months old…. Flamingo crop milk is bright red due to the presence of canthaxanthin, and feeding parents can lose the red color in their feathers…. Parents can recognize their own young by its call, and will not feed others in the flock:

http://www.durrellwildlife.org/upload/MainSite/Documents/pdfs/chilean%20flamingo.pdf

Fake flamingo mommy:

http://www.bronxzoo.com/426208/185480

Discusfish

Discusfish breeding cycle with lots of photos:

http://www.zestweb.com/events/1stbabies/babies080801.html

More detail on the discusfish breeding cycle:

http://members.fortunecity.com/dempseydiscus3/e-breeding3.htm

A Romanian point of view on discusfish:

http://discus.1hwy.com/

Therapsids

Lactation appears to be an ancient reproductive trait that predates the origin of mammals. ….. Mammary patch secretions were co-opted to provide nutrients to hatchlings, but some constituents including lactose may have been secreted by ancestral apocrine-like glands in early synapsids. Advanced Triassic therapsids, such as cynodonts, almost certainly secreted complex, nutrient-rich milk, allowing a progressive decline in egg size and an increasingly altricial state of the young at hatching. This is indicated by the very small body size, presence of epipubic bones, and limited tooth replacement in advanced cynodonts and early mammaliaforms. Nipples that arose from the mammary patch rendered mammary hairs obsolete, while placental structures have allowed lactation to be truncated in living eutherians.

www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=460568&PDF=1

The secretion of nutrient rich milk probably began in therapsids, such as cynodonts:

http://www.ijdb.ehu.es/ijdb200448023/ft249.pdf

Therapsids as a missing link between reptiles and mammals:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/2437/therapsd.htm

Prolactin

Non-parental helping behavior in woodpecker nesting is associated with presence of prolactin and is apparently adaptive:

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-103199-194729/unrestricted/mzkhandiss.pdf

Below studies of a dozen or more bird, fish, and mammal species show that prolactin is associated with, and possibly a cause of, paternal behavior by males. (It was already known to be associated with maternal behavior by females). Three versions of about the same paper, two of them pdfs.

http://physiologyonline.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/14/6/223

You Are What You Eat

Die Verwandlung p 8  
Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day 
The most important meal of the day   
Die wichtigste Mahlzeit des Tages

New Scientist Archive (requires registration for one week free trial)
Science News: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/8_14_99/bob2.htm
Philadelphia Inquirer: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/3464/News/germs.html
Many more articles
Still more articles

Hobson-Jobson

Books by Henry Yule

Yule's translation is still the place to start with Marco Polo. He includes lots of supplementary material about the Venetian navy, the military uses of music during the period, etc., etc. Pelliot's translation and his Notes on Marco Polo should have superseded Yule, but they are almost impossible to find, and the Notes are also inconvenient to read. Cathay and the Way Thither collects a lot of fascinating stuff, but much of it has since come out in significantly better editions.

Hobson-Jobson online text: http://www.bibliomania.com/2/3/260/frameset.html

Hobson-Jobson online search: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/

Hobson-Jobson: 1000 pages for $7.99.

The Travels of Marco Polo, 3rd revised edition: 2 vols, 1300 pages for $48.00. Dover.

Cathay and the Way Thither: 2 vols., 1000 pages for $53.00. Elibron.

(Altogether, 3300 pages for less than $100.00: 33 pages / dollar.)

Has Anyone Ever Read This Book?

The German text of Weber's book can be found here. Commenter "US" has shown that the apparent major-for-minor error on p. 7 is a translator's error, and not Weber's. This means that questions about the level of Weber's musical knowledge will have to be left open.

However, the hypothesis that not a single person has ever actually read this translation of Weber's  book (as opposed to just skimming it) remains on the table.

Article on Weber's sociology of music: Sociological Forum, Vol. 16, #4, Dec. 2001, pp. 633-653.
 

The Waters above the Firmament

Firmament Links: Proof, based on the "firmament" passage,  that Genesis is God's work and not Moses' /Extraordinarily thorough exposition of creationism, with historical background / Christian discussion group on creationism -- discusses "firmament" / Attempt at a reasonable discussion of the "water canopy" theory / Lengthy report on the firmament / The pagan Greek Emperor Antiochus is blamed for mistranslating the Hebrew Bible and confusing everyone / Google search for the "waters above the firmament" / Aquinas on the firmament / Cosmas_Indicopleustes homepage / Cosma Shalizi on Cosmas Indicopleustes

Christian π science:

"Skeptics who allege an inaccuracy are wrong, because they fail to take into account all the data. The Bible is reliable, and seeming discrepancies vanish on closer examination"

"This alleged 'mistake' is a classic example of the desperation of those who, for their own base motives, wish to discredit the Scriptures"

"Back in those days, measurements were not standardized as they are now"

Bottle and Potato Traced to the Source

Crooked Timber thread

Hamburger / Ransom  / Bruce  / Cockney / Wister / Patience  / Byron

Ogden Nash: search for "potato / Plato" and Aristotle / bottle" rhymes

Very thorough discussion of the history of the words "potato" and "yam" in English, French, and other languages

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