So, Chris, which one does have more hair?

The contestants, please?

Mr. Grey Squirrel

Ms. Honey bee.

The question came about when the Georgia Institute of technology was about to spend 3 quarters of a million bucks from the National Science Foundation (NSF, one of several acronyms we will be using to indicate "your wallet") on the function of the hairs between an insect's eyes and found that nobody had done a quantitative study of just how many hairs that might be.

The fun part is, they realized that you get more hairs with more surface area, and the surface area of some animals is astounding.  For instance:

Honey bee SA= a slice of toast SA
House cat SA= Ping pong table
Chinchilla SA= SUV
Sea otter SA= hockey rink


Now at this point, I'm already saying, "Hell yeah, I'll kick in $5 for this one!"  (Actually, we'd all be kicking in about half a penny, so it's all good.) So who has the MOST hair?  Butterflies and moths rack up about a 100 BILLION hairs to top the list;  among mammals, a beaver has one for every man, woman, and child in the US of A.


And our little contest?  They tied at roughly 10 million.  In other fun stories:

SOMEONE WAS MOST DEFINITELY DRUNK WHEN COMING UP WITH THIS ONE:  Once again it was the tag team of GIT and NSF who came up with the question:  How long does it take to pee like a racehorse?  So they went to the zoo with stop-action cameras and measuring cups to see how fast and how much it took for various animals to relieve themselves- I suspect Noah was standing by for the results on this one!

Yeah, I know.  But it's still funny!

 Anyway, they found out most animals, regardless of size, can usually empty themselves in somewhere between 17 and 21 seconds.  Whether you are the housecat, which pees about 5 kg, or an elephant who can fill a large trash can in one shot.  And this very necessary information took only $331,000 of your money.


COMING SOON TO A PICKUP BAR NEAR YOU:  Bowdoin College siphoned almost $4 million from the NSF and NIH trough to put tiny electrical caps on male goldfish, and then injected them with testosterone to see what sexual behavior they would exhibit.  Because of this research, we now know that he can tell the difference between genders even through a plexiglass barrier just by sight.  At higher doses, we learned he could leap a two-foot high partition.

BUT IS IT A GATEWAY TO HARDER STUFF?  The U of Illinois teamed with an Australian school and the NIH to see if COCAINE would affect the dance bees do to alert the hive of nectar-containing flowers.  This quarter-million grant tells us that yes, they get 25% more excited than they should- but only in the context of the dance.  Removed from the dance floor (the area where the hivemates watch the dance), the bees did... well, nothing much.  And what is the takeaway from this study?  That even though they say honeybees are dying off and we'll soon be in big trouble foodwise, they are still willing to make addicts out of the poor bastards for no reason.


And with that, I have exhausted Sen. Jeff Flake's list of stupid crap your money gets spent on.