Moo.
Sep.17, 2008, filed under Miscellany
im_waking_empty alerted me to an article entitled Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
WTF?
We demonstrate by means of simple, noninvasive methods (analysis of satellite images, field observations, and measuring “deer beds†in snow) that domestic cattle (n = 8,510 in 308 pastures) across the globe, and grazing and resting red and roe deer (n = 2,974 at 241 localities), align their body axes in roughly a north–south direction. Direct observations of roe deer revealed that animals orient their heads northward when grazing or resting. Amazingly, this ubiquitous phenomenon does not seem to have been noticed by herdsmen, ranchers, or hunters. Because wind and light conditions could be excluded as a common denominator determining the body axis orientation, magnetic alignment is the most parsimonious explanation. To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth’s magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north.
For one: WHY? WHY would grazing herbivores align themselves with their heads pointing north? What does that achieve? For two: doesn’t the fact that the people who look after cattle have never noticed this indicate that maybe there’s nothing to notice? Maybe there’s something squirrelly going on with the analysis methods?
It’s a little known part of my history, but I spent two years working with cattle in an effort to design a better system for disposing of the parlour and yard washings. I can’t say that I ever noticed, while wandering about amongst the cows, that they were all aligned in the same direction like iron filings near a magnet.
Hmmm. Received for review April 15 2008. Was it a joke?
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
