The Questions that I Exorcise

The curse of reading widely is that all sorts of questions that only tangentially relate to the subject at hand constantly knock at the door to the mind and, oftentimes, forcibly enter. You first detect this mental burglary when you see that you've read a paragraph, sometimes an entire page, without absorbing any of the content written. And yet you cannot simply recognize this and go on-- you know these webs of distraction are sometimes as fruitful as they are inhibiting. I've taken to writing questions down as soon as they come to mind to force them out of my system, into the future. These were today's questions, and some of them were even answerable:

1. Why does the air smell metallic when it gets very cold?

Verdict: Unknowable or not yet known- the internet could not tell me a thing, but perhaps you, dear reader, can. Am I the only one with this affliction?

2. How does cinnamon simulate heat?

Verdict: Apparently there's something called 'cinnamaldehyde' or 'cinnamic aldehyde,' which reacts with the censors in your mouth that normally detect heat, called trigeminal nociceptors. I find the name of the receptor somewhat lacking, but I'm reconsidering names for my first born after thinking through the myriad of nicknames one could have for 'cinnamaldehyde.'

3. How much does the heart of a blue whale weigh? (A fact I had learned in grade school, and promptly forgotten, only to have it surface [ha!] years later)

Verdict: An awful lot- over 1000 pounds, at least. I particularly liked this formulation of the question. 'How heavy is the blue whale's heart'? sounds to me like a delightfully terrible folk song. When I recounted this fact to my boyfriend, he looked at me wide-eyed and said, "Just one heartbeat could kill you!" Indeed. And according to the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, a human could even crawl through a whale's aorta, though the fantasy that we could endlessly circulate through a whale is probably entirely untenable. Pity- no matter how obese we become, we'll never know what it's like to be giant.

4. What does mold look like to ants? (I had been reading about the leafcutter ant's magnificent mold gardens in the amazon)

Verdict: It turns out the gardens of the leafcutter ants are mostly just amorphous and fuzzy, though they're impressive agriculture feats. In the process of researching this, though, I came across a couple of magnificent pieces by the artist Stacy Levy. The image above and the one below feature images of magnified mold (penicillium and aspergillus respectively) which have been sandblasted onto glass plates. Cultures of these very molds are then grown on the plates themselves, to fill in the crannies. Does everything that is moldy twice over acquire such beauty? It makes you wonder what would happen with a third iteration, a third level of moldiness...perhaps everything would just become disgusting again.