"The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy."

Old comic book plot: Scientist working on life extending formula. Inspiration: turtles lives long, redwoods live longer. Succeeds in creating formula and tries it. Denouement: turtles move slowly**, redwoods and immortal scientists don't move at all.

* Still have to attend to its environment.

** This one can move quickly. Take it out of its tank and put it in the middle of the room, it can scoot into the further corner under a desk in a couple of seconds.

My daughter had a painted box turtle as a pet for a while, when she was maybe 9? She took faithful care of him, or it*, fed him treats, and would take him outside occasionally to enjoy the sun in our garden under careful supervision. One day while she had him outside, she got distracted and turned her back for a few moments, and he was just gone. Completely invisible. We searched and searched, through all the bushes, under every plant, under every rock, and after all the tears and the recriminations, he could not be found.

About 10 months later, we found the neighbors' kids playing with a turtle they'd just found in their garden. Yep, there he was again. As best we could guess when we discussed it, he'd been missing his normal seasonal hibernation, so after he vanished he'd found a spot to dig a burrow and hibernated for twice as long as the usual time.

The neighbor kids were totally charmed with him, so she decided they could keep him.

* You try to tell a turtle's sex if you're not a herpetologist.

Team-building — did they give you enough props to make a Voltron?

The past couple of years mine has laid eggs, which is a significant clue. Doesn't have a mate, so they wouldn't be fertile.

That said, I am curious where mine came from — I am quite distant from a pond or river. I've wondered whether someone had done a 'Born Free' ("run free, little turtle, run free").

Teresa- Well, I've pretty much mastered the art of drinking wake-up coffee in my sleep :) Besides, he's awfully cute.

Which is why you should keep them the hell away from candles. Don't forget the story about Mrs. O'Leary's hamster! (The confusion over that is because when Mrs. O'Leary found out how the fire got started, she had a cow.)

-----

We had a desert tortoise stay overnight with us a few years back. It had been being kept in a drug house down the street from a friend's home, and was left behind after the house was raided and the occupants arrested. It wandered out and got picked up by our friend, who passed it on to us. We contacted the Arizona Herpetological Society, who picked it up the next day for more appropriate care and, I assume, eventual release back into the wild. (Took a bunch of photos, which I should really post on Flickr one of these days.)

Pix? Soon? Plz?

Although, from what I recall, humans actually live several times the number of heartbeats that most animals do.

(I also seem to recall that the comparison tends to be about maximal lifespans rather than average.)

I wonder if it's in one of my Asimov anthologies that I was collecting as a teenager. I should check those next time I'm in the same city as they are.

In the midst of our melancholy we all agreed we were thankful for one thing especially: even though we hadn't been able to be with him, the veterinarians we go to are such sweet people and have such a wonderful way with cats that we knew he'd been surrounded by people he liked. He would not have felt abandoned or alone.

That seems incredibly important to us right now, and there are many other vets who may have decent competence but these folks always listen to us AND to our animals. Every cat we've taken there has taken a shine to them.

So it makes me want to say a kind word about them, for the benefit of Portland people - Broadway Veterinary Clinic, 2315 NE Broadway St. I'm planning to send them a card with my gratitude for this fact, and also for the fact that when I first landed in their office, toting a very stretched pocketbook and a cat with bad dental problems, they never said one unkind word about our economic difficulties (and even gave us a break on the charges.)

Serge Broom @ 2: Okay, now somebody has to write Blade Runner hamster AU fic.

A.J. Luxton @19: My condolences on your loss, and my professional gratitude for your kind words about your vet. It's hard for us to lose our patients too, especially when it's sudden and unexpected.

***

I recall the Asimov essay pointing out that humans are an outlier with about four billion heartbeats, maximum. I make the classic "four score and ten" with heart rate of 60 around 2.2 billion, though. If you make the rate 80, closing in on 3 billion; the four billion number involves a heart rate * age (years) product of 7610 - for 100 years at 76 bpm (or 76 years at 100 bpm.) For the maximum record human lifespan, an average 63 bpm.

Google Books suggests that "The Slowly Moving Finger" is the final essay in Asimov's collection Of Time and Space and Other Things, and also appears in Asimov on Science: A 30-Year Retrospective. (Many of his essays were remixed into new collections such as Asimov on Astronomy, etc.)

The invaluable ISFDB tells us that the essay first appeared in the February 1964 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I got hooked on Asimov's science essays as a teenager. Gobbling them like salted peanuts, they eased the way through chemistry, biology, and math classes-- I found I was already familiar with many of the concepts-- and persuaded me to read many of Asimov's full-length books. (Over sixty, I once counted.)

janra @17: If it's Kleiber's law you're referring to, here's what may be the original 1947 paper here (behind a paywall, unfortunately). Here's an article in Nature.

P J Evans @18: If you have two (or more) turtles, you can watch them figuring it out.

It's really difficult to conclusively sex guinea pigs before about two weeks, because their little parts are so, well, little. But I've noticed that one can usually pick out the boys in the litter: even while they're still nursing, they're already sniffing about the girls in a Most Interested fashion. The girls can be identified by the responses of males in their presence by the same behaviors, scaled up.

Ginger @20: I can concur. A good vet is a pearl beyond price. I'm especially grateful to my current vet; their practice is open on Sundays, if you believe. And since the pigs innevitably have their health crises outside of regular business hours, this has saved us more times than I care to count. (They used to be open during all the hours the emergency nighttime vet was not, but that went south along with the rest of the economy.)

Jörg Raddatz @24: not the immediate impact killed them, but the following temperature change led to only one sex emerging from the eggs

Huh. That's a really interesting idea.

Jörg 24: But dinosaurs were not reptiles, right? They were the ancestors of modern birds, or the relatives thereof; warm-blooded, not cold-blooded creatures.

I didn't know until Ginger's post that reptilian gender is not chromosomal, so I don't know much about this either, but IIRC bird gender IS chromosomally determined, though not by the same kind of arrangement mammals use.

Re: llamas: dd's camp usually has a couple of llamas in the "animals" area. The last two summers, one of dd's favorite activities has been to walk a llama around camp. Apparently the hardest part is getting the halter on; after that, they're pretty calm. This summer's llamas tolerated dd well enough that a couple of times the guy looking after them would seek her out and ask for her help in corralling one of them.

Apparently you get a lot of Cool Points by walking a llama, especially if kids from other camps are visiting. Points off if any of them get spit on. (no one was ever spit on while dd was in charge)

She's too old for camp now and will miss the llamas.

Dinosaur sexing: whether or not dinosaur types had chromosomal sex or not (and if most didn't, that may be why birds do!), a lot of modern reptiles (and fish?) are already being affected by global warming.

Vets: props to Charlottesville Cat Care Clinic

Dinosaur sexing: whether or not dinosaur types had chromosomal sex or not (and if most didn't, that may be why birds do!), a lot of modern reptiles (and fish?) are already being affected by global warming.

Vets: props to Charlottesville Cat Care Clinic

Why does Mme. B. believe they're all called Sophie?

Some years ago, on my first visit to LA, a friend and I went to Huntinton Gardens. While wandering past the pond in the Japanese Garden, I overheard fellow tourists say, "Oh look! The turtles are out today!" "Ooo!" "Ahh!"

I looked and looked, couldn't see a damn one. And then, in one of those perceptual shifts that is so startling, I suddenly realized that what I had initially taken to be low cobblestone walls were, in fact, rows and stacks of turtles, basking (somewhat) in the sun.

Google Books suggests that "The Slowly Moving Finger" is the final essay in Asimov's collection Of Time and Space and Other Things, and also appears in Asimov on Science: A 30-Year Retrospective. (Many of his essays were remixed into new collections such as Asimov on Astronomy, etc.)

The invaluable ISFDB tells us that the essay first appeared in the February 1964 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I got hooked on Asimov's science essays as a teenager. Gobbling them like salted peanuts, they eased the way through chemistry, biology, and math classes-- I found I was already familiar with many of the concepts-- and persuaded me to read many of Asimov's full-length books. (Over sixty, I once counted.)

In Norwegian, the definite article for a masculine noun is the ending -en. So "a tortoise" - "ein skilpadde"; "the tortoise" - "skilpadden"[1]

Now my mother has a tortoise, an ancient one that has been in the family for decades. For obscure reasons this wee reptile is known by the patronymic name Pedersen.

My cousin's kid will refer to any tortoise or turtle as "ein peders". It's hilarious but perfectly grammatical - if there's a masculine noun "peders", "pedersen" will be the definite form.

[1] well, it's more likely to be a feminine noun in nynorsk, but this fits better for dialectical purposes.

In any case, she's mistaken. When I did my BA, the college I studied at had a tortoise called Rosa Luxemburg.

What a wonderful and hilarious back-formation!

Whatever works for her. It seems to me much more likely, however, that any tortoise's name is something long, relatively unpronounceable, and full of the sort of apostrophes that are meant to indicate various glottal stops. (Maybe it's the True Name, and the public name is read "Sophie" but pronounced "Rosa", or similar offer.)

The day before the surgery, my partner expressed concern that, if he didn't make it, it was her fault, because she was making the decision. I said to her, "There are several people who have gone hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, and spent years working their fingers to the bone, for the right for it to be their fault - or at least their responsibility."

I said it almost pridefully and out of deep respect: this comes amid a year of pre-med classes and volunteering and reading books on clinical decision-making and MCATs. I'm taking the plunge of applying to med school late in the cycle this year (which means I'm plugging things into AMCAS right now - aiee!) and I've been thinking long and hard on what it means to want to go into medicine.

Most especially, I've been spending a lot of time sitting the fact that with Entropy on the other side of the chessboard one will always lose the tournament, but winning a few matches is well worth the struggle.

(Why yes, I read a lot of Diane Duane, why do you ask?)

And the corollary: that the decision to stand and fight means that Death will sometimes batter through the defenses and failure will sometimes rest on my head, whether or not I did anything wrong, and Doing The Best We Can - and working to change what that means so that the best is better - is the most honorable thing possible.

My little Bobby, just this very morning, failed to evade my evil advances, and got hisself summarily *snuggled*, thanks to the kind offices of my local vet a couple of months ago.

heresiarch, #36: If you take a moment to think about the implications, that comic is deeply creepy.

(Apparently I missed this thread altogether. I'm pretty sure it was because I was on my way to Worldcon at the time, and not checking ML regularly. So the spammer did me a favor.)