Let's play ball!

I remind students that there is a really easy way to realize that we don't know a damn thing.  All we have to do is step outside and look at the living and non-living things around us and ask questions.  It is always humbling.

Or, without going outside, to read something.  Like this one.  

Now, before I get into that article, lemme ask you a question.  If you have seen elephants, there is a good chance you have seen an elephant's penis. Right?  Have you seen an elephants balls?  Its testicles?

Have you?

Think about it.  Picture a male elephant in your mind.  Go beyond the tusks and the ears. Look under its big fat belly.  Do you see its balls?

Until I read that essay, I had never paid attention to elephant testicles.  Not that I walk around looking at testicles.  But, yeah, of course, a dog's balls are hanging--unless we owners neuter them.  

Humans have dangling balls.  Elephants are mammals.  What about their balls? "elephants have their testicles nestled deep within their bodies, all the way up near their kidneys"

That’s unusual: In most other mammals, testicles form during embryonic development near the kidneys and then descend, either to the lower abdomen or an external scrotum, by the time of a male’s birth.

So, we have seen an elephant's penis but not its testicles because there is no scrotal sack where the balls hang!

I did not know that!

Biologists have wondered about this discrepancy for decades. Did the earliest mammals retain their testicles, like elephants, or did they let their family jewels drop?
Studying the DNA of 71 mammals, a German team concluded that testicular descent is an ancestral trait that was later lost in so-called afrotherians, a ragtag group that includes elephants, manatees and several insect-eaters that live in or originated from Africa.

Seriously,  how do people ever walk around with an arrogant sense of I-know-it-all?  

Which then led me to wonder ... we men have at some time or another, accidentally--like a ball crashing into our balls--or because of another person hitting us, felt an unimaginable pain when the testicles were punched.  Isn't it evolutionarily stupid to let such an important reproductive member exposed to danger?  Why aren't we humans protective of our balls like elephants are?

I leave that for the interested reader, along with this boner, er, bonus piece.

Somewhere over the rainbow ... what a way to get to work :)

As a kid in India, and later even as an adult, there were always two things that stopped me if I ever spotted them: elephants and rainbows.  I would watch the sashaying pachyderm for as long as it was within my view on the street.  There is something majestically wonderful about elephants.

Rainbows were rarer than elephant sightings.  If anybody said about a rainbow outside, I always rushed out to admire them. To appreciate them. Even after the physics teacher, Vasudevan, had presented us with the explanation of white light and Newton's experiment with the prism.  The scientific technical details made it all the more impressive.

After moving to Oregon, in the rainy early fall, and throughout the spring days, I have now probably seen more rainbows than I have in my entire life before-Oregon.  Yet, every time, I am impressed even more than ever.  And, then those rare double-rainbows when two parallel arcs of colors magically appear across the big sky ...oh, those are times I think I have died and gone to the heaven that the religious people talk about.

And, so, there I was earlier this morning driving to work, and off on the western sky I had a rainbow accompanying me for a good chunk of the time.  Sometimes it faded out, and sometimes it was bright.  Not a full rainbow, because there were no clouds to provide a background for the zenith.  And then for a few miles when I had to drive west, I was facing the rainbow, which by then had become an uninterrupted arc, with a light drizzle falling on the windshield.  I thought to myself, "they pay me to admire this?"

Maybe the ultimate would be to watch an elephant walk against the backdrop of a rainbow, while the tune of "elephant walk" also plays :)

On the death of seven elephants :(

Elephants were my favorite animals--now they are second only to dogs.  Anytime there was an elephant on the street, I would rush to watch the pachyderm. There was something special about the way this powerful creature slowly walked as if it owned the world.

In Tanzania, while my group mates were rapidly clicking away at the huge African elephants that were only a few feet away, I sat there in the vehicle almost mesmerized by their presence.

Which is why I am just saddened by this news in The Hindu:

Seven elephants, including three calves, were killed when an Assam-bound goods train from Siliguri rammed the herd near the Moraghat railway crossing at Binnaguri in West Bengal on Wednesday night. Five died instantly while two others succumbed to their injuries on Thursday morning. Among the seven dead elephants, three were babies and three females. The accident occurred at the crossing of Moraghat Tea Estate under Banarhat in the Binaguri police station. 

 How terrible.  As humans expand their activities into the areas where the elephants and other animals roam, more often than not the animals lose big time, as in this case.
I wish life was not like this, but fun times with the baby elephant, as Mancini created so well with this tune ...