Leisureguy drove 9 hours today: 4.5 hours up to the kitty breeder, and 4.5 hours back, with The Wife holding the 4-month old red tabby girl kitten, Molly (born 19 April 2007). Molly was terrified at the start of the trip—she had only been around the living room where she lived. She panted and drooled and showed considerable distress. But The Wife brought her out of the kitty carrier and held her and made her feel comfortable enough to sleep. By the time we got home (with part of the car falling off under the front), Molly was happy enough to begin purring. And now she’s ensconced in the bathroom for the night.

Here are two photos made with the camera phone on the way back down I-5:

Molly is a pedigreed Maine Coon cat, which The Wife discovered that she really likes—Sophie was largely Maine Coon, we finally realized. We went up to look at adopting a 3-year-old retired queen (litters too small: just 2 or 3 kittens), who turned out to be sort of bitey and also needing some fattening up and grooming. (Apparently cats that are breeding sort of lose weight in the process—or at least are smaller than neutered cats .) And as soon as The Wife saw the little red kitten, she whispered to me to inconspicuously whisk it out to the car. The breeder told us, though, that the kittens in the house were reserved for breeding.

As the breeder and I chatted, however, we discovered many points of agreement: cats should be indoor cats, so you can skip most of the immunizations (which, she says, are hard on the cat’s system); cats should have people names; you don’t get all upset if the cat scratches some furniture because the cat is much more interesting than the furniture. At the end of it, she said that she had abruptly decided that the red kitten could go home with us. She really wants her cats in good homes, and she’s able to let them go by knowing that in a good home they will receive much more individual attention than she can provide. It also helped that The Wife works at home and thus will be able to provide the cat lots of attention—and vice versa, of course.

So it was a fine trip, overall (though I’m exhausted). On the way home, we discussed lots of possible names, including the name the breeder had given the kitten. We wanted a plain and sturdy name, and as we looked at the abundance of red hair, we thought the name should be Irish. When Molly came up, it was a winner.

Miss Molly is getting used to her new surroundings. She’s in the bathroom, where she’ll spend her first night, in these photos:

In the first picture, that’s not The Wife’s thumb that Molly took away—that’s Molly’s back foot. And the strange thing with her tail is her other back foot. Her front foot is sort of lying on the tail. And she really does have both sides of her mustache—one is just hard to see.

More information to come, including about the special food the breeder recommended and the special food additive. In the meantime, welcome Miss Molly to the blog.

From New Scientist, by Chris Frith, a neuroscientist at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. His book Making Up the Mind: How the brain creates our mental world was published by Blackwell earlier this year.

Earlier this year I temporarily gave up any pretence of having free will for the duration of a transatlantic flight to a meeting in California to discuss free will and the brain. This endeavour is the kind of Big Question that the John Templeton Foundation funds when not, more controversially, encouraging interactions between science and religion.

My fellow delegates included the great and the good in everything from biophysics and neuroscience to philosophy and theology. They reflected all possible attitudes to the existence of free will: denied by hard-nosed bio-neuro-determinists; admitted as something that will emerge from complexity by biological systems researchers; demanded as a moral imperative by theologians.

Curiously, considering it is over 20 years old, a single experiment dominated our discussions. Reported in 1983 (and replicated variously) by Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco, the experiment is crucial because it seems to show we don’t have free will. Using an electroencephalogram, Libet and his colleagues monitored their subjects’ brains, telling them: “Lift your finger whenever you feel the urge to do so.” This is about as near as we get to free will in the lab.

It was already known that there is a detectable change in brain activity up to a second before you “spontaneously” lift your finger, but when did the urge occur in the mind? Amazingly, Libet found that his subjects’ change in brain activity occurred 300 milliseconds before they reported the urge to lift their fingers. This implies that, by measuring your brain activity, I can predict when you are going to have an urge to act. Apparently this simple but freely chosen decision is determined by the preceding brain activity. It is our brains that cause our actions. Our minds just come along for the ride.

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From New Scientist:

Planet-wide heating and cooling of the atmosphere during the 11-year sunspot cycle has been measured for the first time. Climate-change sceptics may seize on the findings as evidence that the sun’s variability can explain global warming - but mathematician Ka-Kit Tung says quite the contrary is true.

Tung and colleague Charles Camp, both of the University of Washington in Seattle, analysed satellite data on solar radiation and surface temperatures over the past 50 years, covering four-and-a-half solar cycles. They found that global average temperatures oscillated by almost 0.2 °C between high and low points in the cycle, nearly twice the amplitude of previous estimates (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2007GL030207).

The finding adds to the evidence that mainstream climate models are right about the likely extent of future human-generated warming, Tung says. It also effectively rules out some lower estimates in those models.

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Not the traditional coleslaw! From the Accidental Hedonist:

1/3 napa cabbage, chopped in slivers
corn from 2 ears of corn, corn granules cut off
zest of 1 lime
1 tbsp sesame seeds
juice of 1 lime
1 tbs toasted sesame oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Mix the cabbage, corn, zest and sesame seeds and then toss with the lime juice and the toasted sesame oil.

Unlike most slaws – this salad actually keeps well and if you have leftovers, you can always use them later as a bed for a poached or fried egg for a breakfast. Alternatively, you can sauté the remaining salad and use it as a side dish for lunch or dinner. Either way, it’s versatile enough to be consumed over a few days.

Em has posted a new video: three ways to create lather using shaving cream.

Light blogging today—we have to make a trip up past Sacramento. Shouldn’t be bad. I’ve posted a few things that will appear later in the day.

I received several samples of shaving cream from another shaver, and among them was one marked as Bulgarian Rose, by Saint Charles Shave. I note that Sue (of SCS) currently does not carry that fragrance, but does carry one called Savory Rose.

At any rate I used my Simpsons Harvard 2 Best Badger to make a lather. The small 1/4 oz. sample jar meant that I couldn’t twirl the brush over the cream, so I dipped up a little with my finger—too little, apparently, since the lather had difficulty persisting. I’ll use this again with more cream. (Because shaving creams tend to create lots of lather, one mistake sometimes made is to use too little cream, making the lather less substantial than it should be.)

I used an English Gillette Junior Aristocrat—it looks like the English Gillette Rocket on steroids: thicker handle, heavier. (The Rocket is the English equivalent of the Super Speed, with the Rocket being somewhat heavier.) I tried the 7 AM blade, but I don’t think that one works for me. Felt a little harsh and I got a couple of nicks. But I did end up with a smooth shave. Still, other blades are a positive pleasure, which is what one wants, eh?

Monday will start a new series of some sort.