WHAT THE.......!!!

This week was all about mysteries my first came via email from my parents a picture of perfectly cleaned off bones which nightly appear on the porch. The bones themselves were tiny about the size of  squirrel and since they have a ton of hawks in the area I surmised the hawk had offed a squirrel and then some other rodent was chewing the bones to get the nutrients from them and since the porch is nice and sheltered what better place to have an nighttime snack.

The second one well that got the whole office buzzing and even made it into our Morning Report which goes out to all staff members so we know about major things happening in the park.  I first heard about the "thing" while working in the visitor's center one afternoon, the exchange when something like this:

                  Visitor: "Have you guys figured out what the thing is up at Cub Lake?"
                   Me:      "I haven't heard about anything unusual up there."

And with that the visitor walked away giving me nothing more to go on.  I gave it no more thought until Tuesday of this week when Leslie walked into the office reporting that she had pictures of the "thing" sent to her by a group of visitors. "I saw Maria's photos of it last night. It's so gross." came a comment from across the room.  Intrigued we waited for the files to open and this is what we saw.

"It's so ugly it's cute." I offered as we all stood around trying to figure out just what the heck it was.  The visitors who emailed the pictures reported it has short silvery looking hair and a white patch around it's nose.  Are our ideas ranged from the just plain goofy, prehistoric rat, to the slightly more sensible, mutant squirrel. We were all stumped and the photos were emailed to the Park's resident mammal  researcher.  In a few days we had an answer as to what it was just not why it looked the way it did.

                                                            

The thing it was reported was a hairless marmot.  While creepy looking the researcher determined it was acting quite normal in foraging, movement, and curiosity.   She also reported there was no explanation as to why it was hairless and that staff were to pass along any other information they got from visitors.  We also found out that this is not the first report of hairless marmots in a National Park.  It appears Yellowstone National Park had an outbreak of hairless marmots back in the late 1980s and the cause of their hair loss was never proven.  

For now our fine hairless friends, yes it was determined there is more than one, will be a creepy curiosity along the trail. 

What are we measuring?

It never ceases to amaze me how many ways there are to describe and measure things in the scientific world.  I am beginning to think scientist just make up new ways to measure things just to confuse the rest of us. By now many of us have heard of the Scolville Scale developed by Wilbur Scolville in 1912 as a way to rank the capsaicin concentration of various spicy peppers.  The downside to this form of measurement is it is based on human tastes and is therefore highly subjective. As I have proven with my infamous Cajin chicken incident; to my mom the chicken was completely inedible, to me it was just really spicy, and to my dad it was not spicy at all.   

So here is just a sampling of crazy ways us scientist measure things which until recently I personally had never heard of.

Water measured in acre foot-  This unit of measurement is used mainly by water resource managers to take stock of the amount of water in reservoirs, aqueducts, and any body of water which is stored for later use. Water resource managers estimate one acre foot of water usage for the average household per year, unless you live in the more desert like environments where the average household is estimated to use 1/4 of an acre foot per year.  So exactly how much is one acre foot of water in terms which the average person can understand?  Well, it is a mind blowing 325,853.38 U.S. gallons. I know what your thinking geeze that's a lot of water each year. Time to implement some water conservation methods?  

Degrees Brix-  Unless you are a food science person, a wine maker, or a person picking strawberries for Wimbledon,  you too have never heard of this. Degrees Brix is a measurement of how much a beam of light bends as it passes through a liquid.  See this website for a more detailed explanation of how this works.  What you ask does this have to do with Wimbledon you ask?  Well apparently there is a preferred sweetness of the strawberries served at this world famous sporting event.  Any strawberry with a degrees Brix rating over ten is considered too sweet.  Personally I have never bitten into a strawberry and then spit it out thinking "man that too sweet."  I think the strawberries at our local grocery store have a degree Brix rating of -10.

A Personal favorite of mine the Smoot- This first came to my attention when I was living in Boston and read a rather small article in one of the local papers about the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity repainting the smoot lines on the Mass Ave bridge. A smoot is a length of measurement of 5 feet 7 inches or the height of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity pledge Oliver Smoot back in 1962. After laying him end to end his fraternity pledge members determined the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge to be 364.4 smoots and one ear. Oliver Smoot is a rather interesting person who went on to become the President of the International Organization for Standardization.

Barn- I've met only one nuclear physicist in my life and he was a pretty funny guy, but it seems like he is not the only one in his field with a sense of humor. A barn is a unit of measurement of the cross section of an atomic nucleus or 10^-28 m².  They also have definitions for an outhouse and a shed. Who would have thought nuclear physicists had such a sense of humor.


This one I stole from Wikipedia Puppy- Lucy van Pelt is credited in the comic strip Peanuts to have discovered the axiom happiness is a warm puppy. The proposed SI unit of happiness, puppy, is derivable as the quantity of happiness that a one kilogram beagle puppy whose body temperature is 310 kelvins produces when held in skin contact for one second.

Want more crazy ways to measure things check out these two websites.

List of humorous units of measurement

 Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements