I’m not going to mention any names. All I’ll say is this: A person I know visited a major research center last year and saw a demonstration of organ removal and some other experimental stuff. A person also visiting asked the famous high-level researcher doing this work if blood was ever blue. What he said was not recorded in detail, but it was very much like this statement I found on the Internet:

… human blood is red as soon as it is oxygenated. Blue blood flows through veins back to the heart and lungs…..
[source: Some Guy on Yahoo Answers]

My friend was disturbed by this, as s/he had been teaching high school students for years that blood is not blue. Her understanding of the situation was that people thought blood was blue because standard anatomical drawings and models depict arteries as red and veins as blue, and because if you look at your veins they are blue. Obviously veins are not clear, but if you don’t think that out you might assume that you were seeing blue blood.

So another year goes by and the same thing happens again. Another visit to the operating theatre, another person asks about blue blood, another confirmation that blood is blue.

Now, I’ve seen both veins and arterial blood either seeping or gushing (respectively) out of various organisms, including humans and various other mammals, on a number of occasions. My grandmother used to spurt out blood now and then because of a condition she had. As I study hunting, I’ve observed lots of thrashing around blood spurting and seeping mammals. I’ve cut myself and I’ve donated blood. And so on.

I’ve never seen blue blood. I’ve seen darker red and lighter red blood. But never blue.

Now, going back to Yahoo Answers, which I am NOT recommending as a source for actual information, but which is a good source for what regular people sometimes think, we have the following three quotes:

Melissa says: When blood gets oxygen it turns red but in your veins it is blue just look at them.

Avondro says: Myth, it’s always red. It goes a darker red, purple-like (Some call it blue) when starved of Oxygen.

SS Agent Dick Wakka says: Somewhat true. Blood is very bright red when it is in the pulmonary vein in the lungs, when it is highly oxygenated. During it’s journey back to the heart after circulating through the body, it is a little blue when it is deoxygenated, but more of a maroon-blue mix. … This is the truth.

Agent Dick gives as a citation a “medical student.” Well, I’ve got a citation of a leading blood researcher at a major research institution that says blood is blue.

I think there are two things going on here, one having to do with physics and the other with culture.

The physical issue is about color. Is “purple” a kind of red, or is it a kind of blue? Beyond that, is blood that is “dark red” or “purple” really purple? Or is it dark red. See my point?

The cultural issue is that more surgeons and folks like that, for much of recent history, are males, and males are bad at color, on average. I’m not talking about color blindness, but rather, color indifference.

So here is what I think: If a person who says to themselves “Blood is blue in our veins” thinks either of the following:

… That blood is blue, like this:

… Or, that blood is “blue” in that you look at your veins and see blue, thus you are seeing your blue blood….

… Or, that you look at an anatomical chart and see the veins drawn in as blue, therefore the blood inside them is blue…

… then that person is laboring under a misconception.

If a person thinks that this “blue blood” is purple, then they may also be laboring under a misconception. The HTML Internet Purple looks like this:

(I know, it looks dark blue to me as well.)

And the Pantone purple looks like this:

(I’ve never seen blood that looks like this)

Pantone Dark Red looks like this:

… but not very much like the darker shades of blood that I’ve seen.

I think dark blood looks a little like this:

This color is 24% red, 2% green, 2% blue, but at a saturation of 92 with a color value of 24 and a hue of 0 degrees. Whatever that means.

(By the way if your computer’s video display is not set to a high value for number of colors shown, all of the above may look like only one or two colors. And, since all video screens are different, I might be seeing something different than you are…)

Anyway, the color that I personally think resembles blood in its darker state is not purple. It is red with a lot of darkness added to it. Or a lack of lightness, or whatever. But it is red.

Human, mammal, and many other organism’s blood is red. But finding out if this is “true” is like squeezing blood from a stone.

If you would like a PDF version of this post, for use in class, here it is.

Photo Credit: postbear via Compfight cc

Otherwise, the answer to the question is: There’s good news and bad news. First the good news. Mold is generally not bad for you (some molds are even good for you, or otherwise enhance food, as in those fancy smelly French cheeses). If you ate mold, just don’t worry. If you feel sick then maybe the mold is a problem, but most likely it isn’t.

Keep in mind, being less concerned with mold than one automatically might applies mainly to mold that was not sufficient in quantity or yuckiness to notice it BEFORE you took a bite, and even during the biting process. In other words, this does not necessarily apply to cases such as the above depicted bread.

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The bad news is simple: If the food is moldy, then it may be old and otherwise contaminated with bacteria and stuff that is not good for you. If you are in a high risk group for such things, or pregnant and trying to avoid listeria, etc., then you might want to avoid old rotten food, and the mold itself, while not harmful, is a clue that the food is old.

As a general rule, soft food is more risky if it is moldy, while hard food (like hard cheese) can be cleaned up by scraping or slicing away the moldy part.

In my personal opinion, First Worlders are more worried about rotten food than they need to be, and throw away a lot of perfectly good food. Try to be less squeamish and check your priv before discarding things that scare you.

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Everything you thought you knew about Brown Recluse Spiders is wrong. There is now a book,The Brown Recluse Spider, to set you straight. This is my review of that book.

His name was Bob. I was a kid, he was an adult that all the other adults seemed to think was cool. He used to have a job launching nuclear missiles for the Air Force, but then later got a job as a Hippie. He, another person or two, and I were sitting on a rock pile out in the woods, checking out the patch of marijuana planted, mysteriously, on the neighbor’s property. The neighbor was the head of the local John Birch Society. Whoever planted the patch of pot figured it would be better found, if ever found by the cops, on his property than on the property occupied by the hippies.

Somebody moved a rock. Bob said, “Oh, look, a Brown Recluse spider. They are deadly, but they hardly ever bite.”

I watched the Brown Recluse spider very carefully for a while and memorized it. I found many more over that summer, and in subsequent years. I became very good at identifying them.

This is what it looked like:

The rock pile harboring the “Brown Recluse” was many hundreds of miles away from the natural range of the Brown Recluse. And of course it wasn’t a Brown Recluse spider. Brown Recluse have been known to take up residence in buildings very far away from their home range, but very rarely. They are not found out in the wild outside of their natural range very often. I think Bob said something about running into these things all the time at the secret nuclear missile base, which was secretly hidden in Wyoming. There are no Brown Recluse spiders in Wyoming, either.

I’m making Bob sound like some kind of idiot. He was not, he was a very smart guy. But he had this wrong and so does everybody else on the planet, it seems.

A study was done about ten years ago to see how bad people were at identifying Brown Recluse spiders. People, focusing on people who should know or claimed to know, were asked to send in their spiders. Brown Recluse spiders were submitted from 49 of the US states and from Canada. They exist, however, in only 17 states and not at all in Canada. There is a spider that lives in California, a very common house spider that had never been properly studied. It does look a bit like a Brown Recluse. So many of those were sent in (California is NOT one of the 17 states Brown Recluse spiders live in) that spider experts were able to use the collection of those spiders, not Brown Recluse but some other species, to do the first major study of its anatomy.

Most of the things people mistake for Brown Recluse spiders are spiders that don’t look much like a Brown Recluse, like the wolf spider depicted above. Many of the submissions from the aforementioned study, and many of the “Brown Recluse” routinely submitted to spider experts by concerned citizens, are not even spiders. There are a few spiders that look like them, but really, it is not hard to learn the difference between the Brown Recluse and its close relatives and all other spiders. But to do so you need some expert training, and that can be attained, if you are attentive, with Richard Vetter‘s new book, The Brown Recluse Spider.

You have probably gotten the email at some point in time. Brown Recluse Spider Season is starting. They are very dangerous. They can kill you. Be afraid, be very afraid. And let’s show you some picture of children with giant patches of rotting and missing body parts or holes in their arms because they were bit by Brown Recluse Spiders, etc.

Vetter’s book is full of information on the Brown Recluse. Vetter is careful to define terms and to not speak over the heads of the average person who is not a spider expert, but at the same time, the work promises to become the standing monograph on this type of spider. It is authoritative and comprehensive where prior study allows, and as such, also points out where there may be excellent research opportunities for up and coming scientists.

I was interested to learn that the majority of behavioral and physiological work done with spiders is done with captive beasts. I believe that is generally the case with invertebrates. But the conditions of captive life dramatically alter key life history variables. More field study needs to be done of spiders, but the difficulties would be significant. It would probably bad for your back and knees. But as an experienced archaeologist, I have no sympathy. Get out there and start collecting field data, you guyz!

The Brown Recluse is one of many related species in the same genus, and the larger family of these spiders is found in both the old and new world. The taxonomy has an interesting and elaborate history, with much renaming and shifting around of phylogenetic position.

Brown Recluse eat mainly invertebrates. They don’t build much in the way of webs, and don’t really use webs to capture prey. They either hang around waiting for something to come along, then possibly attack it, or prowl.

The dispersal patterns of Brown Recluse are very interesting. They may become very common locally, but not found nearby that locality. And by locality, I mean a single outbuilding on a farm, where they are common, not to be found in other outbuildings. That is a very small scale concentration of population. Studies looking at spider dispersal have found that some species of spiders disperse great distances, including those that use a strand of web to fly as much as thousands of feet into the air, presumably traveling great distances. Brown Recluse don’t do that.

The native range of the Brown Recluse and closely related species includes a small part of California, Arizona and New Mexico, all of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, southern Illinois and Indiana, most of Kentucky and Tennessee, Western Georgia, and all the areas I just circumscribed with a circle of states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri. The Brown Recluse itself, however, Loxosceles reclusa, is mainly restricted to Texas north to southern Illinois and east to Kentucky and Tennessee. Oh, and a tiny bit of the Florida Panhandle.

Here is how you pronounce the latin binomial. Say “Isosceles” like in the triangle. Not say it neat, without “ice,” and lock it down with a “Lox” in front. I imagine scholars differ on REEclusa vs. RAYclusa.

According to Vetter, “Outside of its native range, the brown recluse spider is rarely found….In comparison, to find forty buildings populated by brown recluse spiders in Kansas or Missouri, one would have to walk down just one residential street.”

Vetter makes two very important points about this spider that you need to understand.

First, many, many Brown Recluse spider bites, serious afflictions that are treated as spider bites, are not Brown Recluse spider bites. The misdiagnosis is generally done by a professional medical worker, and often in conduction with someone identifying a spider as a Brown Recluse incorrectly. There are other medical afflictions, including other bites but also things that are not even invertebrate caused, that are mistaken for bites of these shy spiders. That can lead to serious negative consequences for the patient. Also, for any invertebrates living in the area along with any one who breaths in the anti spider gas and juices that may be liberally spread around to kill a spider that does not exist locally.

The second is that we actually know too little about the physiology of the Brown Recluse spider bite, and need to know more. Vetter has a whole chapter on this.

The bottom line is that Brown Recluse spiders are extremely common in some areas but hardly ever bite anyone, and totally absent from vast areas where they are blamed, incorrectly, for the occasional lesion.

There are definitely dangerous spiders, and the Brown Recluse is one of them. But the human reaction to spiders in general, and even to the species that do have a nasty bite, is almost always overblown, as least in Western culture.

I believe that the vast majority of “spider bites” people get are not spider bites. Here’s why. The ideal mosquito bite involves the mosquito getting her proboscis deep into your skin, hitting a blood vessel, and withdrawing a good meal of blood. That takes a long time and is often not successful. The unsuccessful “bites” may leave a mark and be itchy, and that is what most people think of as a mosquito bite. But a successful bite will generally leave a welt, large, red, painful, itchy, and that stays around for a few days. When people get those, they call them spider bites. Why? Because most people simply don’t know what a real mosquito bite is, and think spiders bite them all the time.

That is why The Brown Recluse Spider by Vetter is a great book. It is clear, well written, authoritative, and you can’t help but be much better informed by reading it. If you live in Brown Recluse land (see map above) you need this book now, just go get it. If you don’t, and you are into inverts, science, or anything related, you’d enjoy it as well. Great book, highly recommended.

How long is a generation, you ask?

Short Answer: 25 years, but a generation ago it was 20 years.

Long answer: It depends on what you mean by generation.

In US-biased Western culture there is a Biological Generation, the Dynamic Generation, the somewhat different Familial Generation, what is sometimes called a Cultural Generation but that should really be called a Societal Generation, and then there is the Designated Generation and finally, the Historical-Long Generation. You will find some of these terms identified on genealogical web sites, Teh Wiki and elsewhere, and some of them are introduced here. (References provided below.)

More broadly speaking, humans have identifiable meaningful generation-related terminology and cultural concepts in many but not all societies, and when it does occur, it is more common to find the concept in age-graded societies or societies in which marriage arrangements are fairly strictly enforced (or at least strongly hoped for) by the ascending generation.

A Biological Generation

A Dynamic Generation

Those methods of reckoning generations have to do with the relationship between people. Another reason to reckon generations is either to do demographic (or economic) analysis or to test and analyze genealogies. For this you want to know how long a dynamic generation (or a biological one) usually is. For instance, a genealogist wants to know this: From the point of view of some long-dead relative, is the time span between the birth date of a grandparent and the birth date of a great grand child … thus, the span of time of four complete generations … reasonable? If such a span is 200 years, that means that an average of 50 years time passed from birth of a person to that person giving birth to the person in line. Implausible. If the total span is 40 years, that means ten year olds were having babies (on average). Also implausible. Either way, some part of the hypothetical genealogy is messed up and it’s back to the church records, vital statistics, and Mormon database for you. This is a Familial Generation.

In the “old days” (whenever that was) people often used the value 20 to represent Familial Generations. So, a person born on the first day of a century may well have had a great great great grandparent born around the beginning of the previous century. Today, with lager age at first birth for women being the rule, we tend to see 25 years as the recommended estimate for Familial Generations.

A Cultural or Societal Generation

• Lost 1914
• Greatest 1923
• Silent 1935
• Baby Boom (Boomers) 1955
• Generation X 1968
• Generation Y 1975
• Generation Z or I 1992

(See comments below for people fighting about these names and dates. I accept Teh Wiki as the final word on this, so I take this list as perfectly accurate and complete.)

Several things are noticed in this list. The first three relate to major historical events (World Wars, the Great Depression) while the later ones are vague, stupid, and obviously little more than lame attempts by people who wish they were part of a generation to name themselves. This leads to the X and Y generations to be floating in broader time ranges (see Teh Wiki) and very arguable. The Z generation is clearly an afterthought. I assume everyone was so focused on the Millennium that they forget to be in a generation for a decade or so, and then had to catch up.

Some of the more primitively sexy and exotic tribal cultures of the world of the world have a strict age grading system. This is where individuals are in a specific age-defined stratum, and there are several strata. Often there are different age-grades for males and females, and often there are more age-grades for males than females. Individuals of a particular age grade always X and never Y (fill in cultural prescriptions for X and cultural proscriptions for Y). The Pokot of East Africa are one example. These age grades can be termed Designated Generations and include not only groups like the Pokot but also Americans who have very strongly age-graded designations.

Check out our new science podcast, Ikonokast.
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Among the Pokot males of a certain age wear a certain hairdo. Males of a certain generation get married. All the important things you can do or not do are defined by one’s age grade. As young men age they want to move to the next age grade, and often take serious risks to do so. In one Pokot group, the boys of one age grade would typically wear the hairdos of the Ascending Generation. Males in the Ascending Generation would then beat the crap out of them. When the beatings became too common and severe (sometimes deadly) the Ascending Generation of the Ascending Generation (the “Elders”) would declare that it is time for everyone to move up one generation, and a ceremony would be held.

In that particular group the ceremony applied to many different villages, and representatives from each village had to bring to the major chief’s village one head of cattle. The cattle were all slaughtered and the fresh meat laid out on racks to be guarded from lions and hyenas overnight by the chief, alone. If any of the meat was taken by predators, the chief was fired and a new chief appointed, everyone was sent home and were required to return with a fresh head of cattle, and the ceremony was re-started with the new chief. But I digress.

The Historical-Long Generation is my own invention. This is the period of time that is just short enough for a person to have a conversation with another person about shared memories where those memories are separated in time by the maximum amount possible for our species. Let me explain further:

Just today, the last surviving US veteran of World War I died. When I was a kid, I went to (or marched in) parades in which there were lots of veterans. Most vets in the parade were of World War II. Korea was not ever represented. The Viet Nam Vets were busy in Viet Nam being Viet Nam soldiers, so they were not in the parades. But World War I was represented by the grandpas and there were a lot of them.

And, leading all of the veterans in the parade was this one guy who looked quite dead, eyes closed, not apparently breathing, wearing a 19th century Slouch Hat and covered with a blanket and slumped in wheel chair pushed by members of the VFW Ladies’ Auxiliary, and he was the only remaining veteran in town of the Spanish-American War. I know he was not in fact dead because he was in the parade several years in a row. That war was in 1898, and the parades I remember must have been from the mid 1960s. I assume he was a drummer boy, perhaps 10 or 11 at the time of the war. The last surviving vets from Civil War were similar: Boys who served in the military as aides or drummers. The point is, one could argue that a historical-long generation is about a century, because that old guy and I share involvement in an event … marching in those parades … that link two memories, the parade and the war, which were about 100 years apart.

I have an even better memory. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on Januray 1st, 1863. When that happened, a toddler who’s last name was Alexander and who was born as a slave in the Carolina’s became free. Later, his family moved to Albany, New York. In around 1968 or 1969, my father asked me to accompany our congressman, Representative Samuel A. Stratton (famous for introducing the bill to give us Monday Holidays, I am told) to an old tenement building in “Teh Ghetto” and bring him up to the third floor to meet Mr. Alexander, the now old former infant slave. I did so, and we all chatted for a while. I was about ten, and Mr. Alexander was closer to 110. He had memories of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that were similar to my memories of the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Vague, mostly about the aftermath and not the event so much, but seemingly real. We shared memories that were a century apart in time, and in this case, interestingly parallel.

So, the Historical-Long generation is a century. If you meet me and shake my hand, you are shaking a hand that has shaken the hand of a man who was an American slave. Meaningless, yet profound.

Fox, Robin.Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Lutz, Catherine. Reading National Geographic

Teh Wiki. Generation.

Teh Wiki List of generations.

Below the fold to not crash your flash.

First, this tear jerker:

Let’s look just at the brain part of this problem.

There are between 50 and 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and every one is connected to a minimum of one other neuron to produce about 100 trillion connections. So when we are thinking about how the brain is wired up, we have to explain how so many connections can be specified to make the brain work.

There are thousands of genes that seem to be expressed mainly or exclusively in the brain … perhaps as many as 10,000 (or about half the genes that are active in the human genome) … but this vast difference between number of connection and number of genes is true to nearly the same extent for all mammal brains. A human brain has way more connections (and much more “higher cognitive function”) than a mouse brain, but with about the same number of genes, There may be some unique added genes in the human, but the number of additional brain circuits required to add human language and cognitive function to a mouse can not be explained by there being more genes, unless individual genes do not do much in the way of detail.

All human populations over long(ish) evolutionary time are subjected to similar selective pressures to have a smaller brain. Large brains in humans kill mothers and children in birth. Death in childbirth is, in fact, higher for humans in a “natural state” than other mammals. The large brain is being selected against to a significant degree, or at least, it is safe to assume this.

However, large brains persist. There is some literature suggesting that some “races” have smaller brains than others. As far as I know these assertions are very suspicious, and while brain size varies across different samples, there is no reliable data suggesting that there are major population level differences in human brain size. All of the proposed differences that I have studied involve very poor data and very inappropriate manipulation of the data to make it look like there are significant population differences in brain size.

So, humans have whopping big brains, we should not have such large brains from the perspective of natural selection unless they are conferring some advantage to offset childbirth related mortality, and the number of neurons and connections, and overall complexity of human brains may be affected by genetics, but it is not possible for these connections to be specified in any level of detail by genes. Indeed, only rough patterns could be stipulated by genetic programming, and in comparing the anatomy of normal human brains, we do not see differences between populations.

As an aside: There certainly are genetic abnormalities that cause abnormalities in human brains, but just as a gene that cause a person to be born without legs is not assumed to have alleles that affect running abilities, a gene that if “broken” causes a “broken” brain can not be assumed to be a gene with allelic variation that affects day to day normal brain function. Genes don’t work that way, bodies don’t work that way.

So we are left with the question: How does your brain get to the point where it functions? You may not realize this, but there is an ancillary question as well: How come highly smart human-like brains seem to not evolve very often on this planet?

The way mammalian brains form is generally the same: Genes specify, using signaling chemicals, overall positioning of proliferating neurons, which then over-reproduce and over-connect. So, all individuals start out with brains with many extra neurons and many extra connections. This infantile mammalian brain is so over-produced in terms of cells and connections that it can’t function well. It is also short on insulating fats that normally cover the axons (the parts that connect neurons to other neurons).

Then over time connections break and neurons die. This process mainly depends on input. So, neural connections that are not used die. Neural connections can thus, during development, be formed in response to the environment, where the environment includes other parts of the brain, the body the brain is in, and the surrounding physical environment the body lives in.

And, in the case of humans and presumably to varying degrees some other mammals, the brain is shaped (sculpted, really) by the culture in which it grows.

This process of shaping the brain based on the culture within which exists is a Darwinian process a the neural (not genetic) level because neurons have different chances of survival depending on this environment. The degree to which this is an externally caused cultural process is well exemplified by the way reading and writing capacities form in the brain. We have brain regions specific to these functions, which could not have evolved and can not be specified by genes, which differ between individuals in how well they function (how “reading able” someone is) based on their experience, and the kind of language being read or written sometimes even determines which region of the brain is shaped for this function. Some languages use mainly temporal regions and other languages use mainly occipital regions. A person who can read and write in both kinds of languages can lose, due to brain damage such as a stroke, the capacity to read or write one of the languages with the other left intact because of this physical separation.

Culture is not only required to create a functioning human brain, but culture can create all different kinds of brains. There are probably limits as to how different brains can be, based on cultural differences, but finely tuned tests can be constructed to measure some of these differences. In my view, Western Middle Class Intelligence Tests are one such measure. It is said that such tests have been redesigned to remove all biases, but the same people who make that claim have also made other claims about human brains that show that they have little concept of how brains develop or how they may differ from environmental causes.

Another potential cause of difference in brains that is also environmental is dietary. It is probably true that almost everyone’s brain is challenged by shortages of energy, oxygen, and key nutrients at various stages of growth and development because the brain is so demanding. But individuals who have had more such challenges may well end up with a brain lacking adequate myelination in some areas, or damaged glial functioning or some other problem that can impair brain function.

Home environment, linguistic environment, diet, and other environmental factors probably sum to having a much greater effect on brain development (and thus on various tests of brain function) than genetic factors. Or at least, in the absence of overwhelming evidence (or even modest evidence, for that matter) to the contrary, environmental causes of variation in the brain, which is an environmentally shaped organ, can safely be assumed to be paramount based on everything we know about brain development and function.

The best book I know of to explore this issue is not too current but is still quite good. Supporting evidence for everything given in this post will be found in this source: The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terry Deacon.

The idea is to blame single mothers for crime. They, being single mothers, would do a lousy job of raising their offspring, who would then grow up and be criminals. There is a racist undertone to this, with a twist. There are those who would like to blame non-white people for all the crime, and this is a version of that. The same racist “science” that underscores the link between melanin in one’s skin and criminal behavior also purports that there is a link between melanin in one’s skin and all the things that lead to single motherhood, from promiscuity to a tendency to not follow social rules to, amazingly, a shorter gestation period which would, I assume, allow single mothers to produce more offspring than might otherwise be possible.

Anyway, there are those who remember the link being made, and here is what the data for violent crime in the US looked like at the time:

Nice relationship there. All else being equal one would want to look at these two variables and see if there is anything to the argument. We KNOW the two variables are related, because otherwise, why would anyone put them on the same graph!@!?? And, once they are on that graph they are perfectly correlated. One small thing that would need to work out is the fact that the criminals are probably not infants, but I’m sure that the time lag thing is just a detail.

Anyway, now, time has passed since that correlation seemed to be explanatory of high crime rates. Has anything changed since then? Let’s look at the data, updated:

Well, now that we see the whole data set, one might wonder why single motherhood rate was not correlated to crime rate prior to 1970. Maybe that’s the time lag thing. It turns out, in fact, that of the 50 years shown on this graph, the correlation seems to work for only about half the time.

Single mothers, you are off the hook. FOR NOW!

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

What does this quote mean to you? If you don’t know its context, you may be in for a surprise.

You see this quote all the time on K-12 educational material as a header, footer, slogan, logo, inspirational message, and so on. It obviously means something good about teachers. Maybe something good about education. The quote is by Henry Adams and comes from his book “The Education of Henry Adams” which sounds an awful lot like a title for a porn movie. Since this is a book, first circulated in 1907, about education it must be the case that this quote refers to the positive power of educators back then, and presumably, now. Right? Certainly that is the meaning that is usually attributed to it.

A Google search of

“A teacher affects eternity”

… yields 56,000 hits, many of which are examples of the term’s use as an inspirational maxim in one or another dialog about education. So clearly people are in tune with the positive message of Henry Adam’s sentence.

A Google search of

“A teacher affects eternity” -adams

… (thus leaving off a direct reference to Henry with the minus sign in front of ‘adams’) yields about 26 thousand hits and I’ll wager almost every one represents the use of the quote as a positive maxim in the dialog about education. One teacher uses the phrase as the title for a web site on teaching.

Via Google I find the phrase tweeted on Twitter, and checking directly with Twitter, we find a gazillion recent instances over the last few weeks. I estimate that approximately four times an hour someone tweets “A teacher affects eternity” and sometimes gives the rest of the quote, sometimes mentions it’s Henry Adams’. But they always seem to mean it to be a nice thing to say about teachers and about how important they are.

You can buy note cards or posters with the phrase, and if you know any teachers, ask them how many pillows embroidered with the phrase or a version of it they have been given. Or shadow boxes or little signs held by teddy bears. Which they give to the teacher as a way of saying that they like teachers.

The book* The Education of Henry Adams is a complex work that I will not try to characterize, but at least in part I take it as a literary act of cynicism. Adams speaks of himself in third person and by the time we get to the quote in question he is discussing Henry’s first nine months as an Assistant Professor in History at Harvard.

For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on, till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.

Henry thinks of himself as inadequate, not up to the job, apparently.

But part of the problem was with Harvard itself, and its inattention to quality education.

The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of History. The two full Professors of History — Torrey and Gurney, charming men both — could not cover the ground. Between Gurney’s classical courses and Torrey’s modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the Middle Ages.

In other words, the History Department at Harvard was a mess, a chain of rusty links of which Henry himself was the weakest. Henry Adams does not think the teachers at Harvard were doing what needed to be done, the system of education was not doing what was required, and the students were probably being damaged more than assisted by participating in this system. And this worried him.

Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.

In other words, all those important people in your life: Your mom, a person who kills you, and so on, have only limited effects on you as a person. But, according to Henry Adams,

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

OMG. That sounds like bad news. The system of education sucks, the professors suck, the students are getting the shaft, and this will affect the students for their whole lives, and through them society in general, and the course of history itself. Bad teaching, Henry Adams is telling us, ruinz everything for everybody!

But this is not what people think is happening, is it?

A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either to be taught as such — or falsified.

From here Adams goes on to an interesting discussion that misunderstands (modern) evolution, and very rightly laments the thorn that the Middle Ages is in the side of western civilization. And in that discussion he reiterates that while all this is interesting stuff, it is not what is taught to the students. Because the teachers, really, don’t have a clue as to how to interpret the material they are responsible to cover or how to convey it to their pupils.

Here is Henry Adam’s famous quote translated into modern parlance:

Be careful. The system of education is inadequate, and a half baked attempt to educate is dangerous. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell how badly fucked up everything will be when he is done with it.

I had always seen the quote as what most people seem to see to as: The nice phrase you embroider on the pillow and give to your favorite teacher. My friend Josh Borowicz, who happens to be an historian and a Henry Adams scholar, pointed this interesting irony out to me. Knowing this is likely to affect me for an eternity. And a half.

You can read the full text of The Education of Henry Adams here.

You need to know the following three things. These facts will save you from getting tossed out of college or having a mark on your high school record.

1) Teachers hate plagiarism more than they hate stepping on puppies and kittens. If there are two students in a class, and one has plagiarized an assignment and one has crushed some puppies and kittens, and the teacher only has time to turn one of them it to the administration, they’ll turn in the plagiarizer.

2) There has almost never been a case where a student was proved to have plagiarized something (by matching the original to the student’s paper) where the plagiarism wasn’t already blindingly obvious to the teacher to begin with. In other words, when you plagiarize something, it is always spotted immediately. If some other student tells you that they got away with it, they are lying to you (like House says, people always lie) or the teacher chose to not turn them in. Yet.

Given this, you should understand that plagiarism is never a good strategy for improving your grade. Just don’t do it.

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Having said that, and recognizing that you didn’t come to this blog post to learn how to cheat, we can examine the marginal, rare cases that seem to happen so often; There are times, according to some students, when they didn’t really mean to plagiarize but they did anyway by mistake. For instance, the student copies a bunch of text from various web sites into a document file, then proceeds to write his own prose, deleting these “notes” as he goes. Then he saves the file and just at that moment the computer crashes. When the computer comes back up again, the file seems to be there but he has to get to basketball practice so he doesn’t look at the file. Then the next day he just turns the file in and never realized that the file had reverted to the earlier version which was nothing but snippets of text from various Wikipedia pages.

You might need this: I’d Rather Be PLAGIARIZING

Which brings us to the third thing:

3) It does not matter if you did not mean to plagiarize or if you did it by accident or if your dog did it while you were not looking or whatever. Plagiarism is when you hand in work that consists wholly or in part of the work of another, unattributed. It does not matter how it got there. It does not matter what your intent was. It only matters that someone else’s work was passed off as yours.

You might be thinking that teachers and others are overplaying this. You might be thinking that it is not as though civilization will come to an end if plagiarism happens, so just get over it. If that is what you are thinking, then you are definitely not getting this: The truth is, that if plagiarism happens a lot, an important part of civilization will in fact end. The fact that you don’t understand this is of no interest to the keepers of civilization who will crush you like an ogre crushes a puppy if you do it. So deal.

So, what about the title of this post? How do you avoid getting caught plagiarizing? There are two steps to this process.

1) Don’t do it.

2) Don’t seem to be doing it, and for that, I have some actual helpful advice.

When you do go about copying and pasting text from the Internet as part of your research ALWAYS use a simple convention to make sure that this text is ALWAYS identified as someone else’s. Your convention needs two parts: Attribution and delimiters.

Delimiters first. When you copy something into a document file form the Internet, always use the same symbols to surround the text you copies. I suggest /slash marks/ or possibly [brackets]. Later, you can look at your document and know which parts are either notes destined to be erased or quotes destined to be put in “quote marks” or made into a block quote.

The attribution is the information you put just after the text you copied so you can reference it later. There are a lot of ways to do this. The simplest way for a small project is to make a list at the bottom of your document that has the URL’s you used as sources, numbered, and then use the numbers in your document to identify the text. It is not my job to tell you the proper way to provide attribution and bibliographic references for your work … that varies with the school, the academic discipline, and the instructor. But however that is supposed to be done, it is in this stage of assembling the notes and information that you must link the reference to the source to the actual material.

If you use the delimiters, and your computer crashes and returns your document to the “notes” version, and you accidentally hand that in, you wont’ get in trouble for plagiarizing! Why? Because instead of handing in this…

The aardvark (Orycteropus afer, from Greek ???????????? (orykterópous) meaning “digging footed” and afer: from Africa) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa.[2] It is the only living species of the order Tubulidentata, although other prehistoric species and genera of Tubulidentata are known.

Aardvarks have 4 toes on the forefeet and 5 toes on the hind feet, each ending in a spade-like claw that helps them to dig with great speed and force. Digging is used both to acquire food and as a means of escape. The stance is digitigrade.

… as though you wrote these words, which would actually be plagiarized from two sources, you’d be handing in this:

/The aardvark (Orycteropus afer, from Greek ???????????? (orykterópous) meaning “digging footed” and afer: from Africa) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa.[2] It is the only living species of the order Tubulidentata, although other prehistoric species and genera of Tubulidentata are known./ [1]

/Aardvarks have 4 toes on the forefeet and 5 toes on the hind feet, each ending in a spade-like claw that helps them to dig with great speed and force. Digging is used both to acquire food and as a means of escape. The stance is digitigrade./ [2]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark
2. http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Orycteropus_afer.html

And then your teacher will be like, “What’s this” and you’ll be like “oh, crap, those are my notes! My computer crashed and this musta legit happened, man!”

You might get a crappy grade for this, but you won’t have that letter added to your file that will follow you around for the rest of your life.

There is something else you need to be aware of. Plagiarism isn’t just copying the exact words someone else wrote as though they were your own. It is also stating ideas that other people wrote and not attributing the ideas to them. There is something you need to know if you are writing an essay for high school or an intro college course: I promise you that your grader or teacher will be much more impressed by your frequent use of properly done citations than with some lame idea you claim (inadvertence or purposefully) to have had which is not really yours. Keep in mind that the people who are reading your essay have likely already read some or even all of the material you are using. If you present an idea as your own, and the idea is already in the literature, we know that either stolen the idea or you’ve had an unoriginal idea that you did not know was out there because you’ve not really done your homework.

If you really do have an original idea or observation, which is quite possible because you are clearly a very smart person if you’ve read this far in this very important essay, then make it clear in your work that it is your idea. How do you do that? Using language. Words. Sentences. Just say it. If you were busy writing your essay in the third person or in passive voice, then you may have a hard time phrasing a reference to yourself. Otherwise, just say that something is your idea. But just before you do that, google it. Maybe you’ll find someone else saying the same thing, and that will be a win because you’ll have yet another reference to properly cite in your essay!

Aprile Pazzo was about to call it a day when she noticed that the penguins she was observing seemed strangely agitated. Pazzo, a wildlife biologist, was in Antarctica studying penguins at a remote, poorly explored area along the coast of the Ross Sea. “I was getting ready to release a penguin I had tagged when I heard a lot of squawking,” says Pazzo. “When I looked up, the whole flock had sort of stampeded. They were waddling away faster than I’d ever seen them move.”

Pazzo waded through the panicked birds to find out what was wrong. She found one penguin that hadn’t fled. “It was sinking into the ice as if into quicksand,” she says. Somehow the ice beneath the bird had melted; the penguin was waist deep in slush. Pazzo tried to help the struggling penguin. She grabbed its wings and pulled. With a heave she freed the bird. But the penguin wasn’t the only thing she hauled from the slush. About a dozen small, hairless pink molelike creatures had clamped their jaws onto the penguin’s lower body. Pazzo managed to capture one of the creatures — the others quickly released their grip and vanished into the slush.

Over the next few months Pazzo caught several of the animals and watched others in the wild. She calls the strange new species hotheaded naked ice borers. “They’re repulsive,” says Pazzo. Adults are about six inches long, weigh a few ounces, have a very high metabolic rate — their body temperature is 110 degrees — and live in labyrinthine tunnels carved in the ice.

Perhaps their most fascinating feature is a bony plate on their forehead. Innumerable blood vessels line the skin covering the plate. The animals radiate tremendous amounts of body heat through their “hot plates,” which they use to melt their tunnels in ice and to hunt their favorite prey: penguins.

A pack of ice borers will cluster under a penguin and melt the ice and snow it’s standing on. When the hapless bird sinks into the slush, the ice borers attack, dispatching it with bites of their sharp incisors. They then carve it up and carry its flesh back to their burrows, leaving behind only webbed feet, a beak, and some feathers. “They travel through the ice at surprisingly high speeds, ” says Pazzo, “much faster than a penguin can waddle.”

Pazzo’s discovery may also help solve a long-standing Antarctic mystery: What happened to the heroic polar explorer Philippe Poisson, who disappeared in Antarctica without a trace in 1837? “I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that a big pack of ice borers got him,” says Pazzo. “I’ve seen what these things do to emperor penguins — it isn’t pretty — and emperors can be as much as four feet tall. Poisson was about 5 foot 6. To the ice borers, he would have looked like a big penguin.”

Originally appeared in Discover Magazine on April 1st, 1995.

In other news:

New Ape Species Discovered!