DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Our room at the B&B in Sutter Creek offered the usual amenities: fancy breakfast, gourmet snacks and champagne at happy hour, enough pillows on the bed for a family of Hydras (Hydrae?) and, refreshingly, less than my total annual capacity for cuteness.

The phone policy impressed me immediately: local calls are free and unmetered, and there is no surcharge to access long-distance carriers. Even better, the phones were not hard-wired, so plugging the telco line into my laptop was a breeze.

And although I didn’t use it, the inn offers wireless net access too (albeit for a fee). After witnessing all this convenient technology, I was not surprised to learn that the owner works for Intel.

The nightstand of every room hosted a white-noise machine. I found this to be a nice touch, useful for masking the sounds from the neighboring room. Or our own (ahem!). There were six channels of sound available: surf, stream, rain, waterfall, and one that seemed to be silent except for occasional sounds of skidding tires and then metal impact, glass breaking, etc. I think that was the “blizzard” channel.

Actually the sixth selection was a heartbeat sound, the use of which I do not understand. We took to calling it the “stalker channel.” It was spooky and unnatural — who regularly falls asleep to the sound of an amplified heartbeat? I thought maybe the manufacturer included that sound for use by newborns. But then I realized that no newborn would have arms long enough to reach out of the crib to turn the thing on or off, making it pointless after all.

I stumbled across a funny comic strip: Pearl Before Swine. I really enjoy the wordplay.

They only seem to archive 30 days’ worth, so I nearly didn’t point to any individual strips, as the links would break within a month. But one was too good to skip: Fast Sally. I’ve saved a copy to a local mirror with hopes that UFS considers this a specific educational purpose, aka “fair use.”

If you read this before July 10, check out the witty series beginning on June 10.

Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge today, I did a double-take when I saw a big electronic traffic sign announcing  CAUTION DEBRIS AHEAD!

Oh, I’d have given just about anything to sneak a “.com” in there… anyone know how to hack the Bridge district’s traffic sign controller?

This is one of those things you just need to know. It actually came up in a conversation at a party a few weeks ago, but nobody was certain of the answer, and we were left in that unsatisfying condition of speculation… the sort of thing that drove us all straight home to Google. Well, that’s true in my case, anyway; the rest of the people at the party probably have lives.

Into whichever camp you might fall, the addicted-to-google, or the having-a-life, you can spare yourself from our embarrassing fate! Read on for the fascinating answer to the question: what are the four taste sensations?

Students of science may recall that the tongue can identify only a few basic tastes, and that the rest of what we call “flavor” is comprised primarily of smell (olfaction) and, to a lesser degree, tactile sensation within the mouth. Here are the four taste sensations most folks can recite, if they were paying attention in 7th grade rather than chucking paper wads out the window when the teacher’s back was turned:

• bitter
• salty
• sour
• sweet

Students endowed with robust memories might even recall that specific areas of the tongue are sensitive to each of these four sensations, as illustrated by this nifty interactive taste-region map.

If you didn’t remember the four sensations, or the taste regions of the tongue, don’t feel bad… all the people who did remember were incorrect anyway.

Yes, that’s right: the arcane knowledge they dredged up from the depths of grade-school memory is inaccurate in two respects; worse, it was known to be incorrect at the time those folks’ textbooks were written. (By the way, this is one of the ways I justify my feeble powers of recall — I figure most of the stuff I’ve forgotten was wrong to begin with.)

Here is the straight scoop: scientists now recognize a fifth taste sensation, which at the party I remembered vaguely by saying, “And what’s that fifth one, they have it in Japan…” which shed about .00015 yocto-watts of illumination on the topic, even though my comment was historically accurate.

The sensation is called umami; it was discovered and named by Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda in the early 1900s. The chemical that causes umami — that is, the substance that triggers the taste receptors that transmit the message “this isn’t bitter, salty, sour, or sweet, but something else, and by the way I’m kind of enjoying it” to the brain — is glutamic acid, or, essentially, MSG.

What a coincidence, you might wonder, that a known flavor enhancer (monosodium glutamate) would contain the precise chemical that triggers this umami flavor! It is in fact no coincidence at all: Kikunae Ikeda invented MSG.

Finally, in stark contradiction to the taste map referenced above, no less an authority than Scientific American has this to say: Taste researchers have known for many years that these tongue maps are wrong. The maps arose early in the 20th century as a result of a misinterpretation of research reported in the late 1800s. The article is entitled, unambiguously, The Taste Map: All Wrong.

So there you have it: five taste sensations, not four, and no spatial segregation of sensitivities across the tongue. The only other thing you might need to know about the sensation of taste is that there is early evidence of a sixth sort of receptor, the existence of which is demonstrated by a friend of mine who can often be heard to say, “That tastes like ass!” I don’t think anyone has researched that particular component of gustation yet though.

A work crew from the local seamless-gutter franchise came by the house to repair a leaking downspout. The three guys dressed just alike: they wore shorts but no shirts. They had uneven coloration, from standing with their backs to the sun. And they all carried expensive sunglasses.

But for these similarities, the differences were revealing. The crew foreman was a big, fleshy, muscular guy with a deep red-brown sunburn, an intensity of purpose, and piercing eyes. The fancy sunglasses were propped up on his forehead.

His crew was made up of two other guys, the leader of which was muscular but not burly, deeply tan but not burned, and clearly skilled but not in charge. He also had $200 sunglasses, worn on the back of his neck.

The third guy was the rookie. Besides the fact that he was standing around looking clueless most of the time, I knew he was the apprentice because he was scrawny and not very tan. His sunglasses were clipped to his belt.

I stifled a laugh (generally good advice when surrounded by half-dressed men), for this trio looked like nothing so much as a set of animated Matryoshka dolls — if they’d split apart at the waist, they could be nested one inside another.