Los Odds y Las Ends

-- The conventional wisdom holds that chameleons change their color as a form of camouflage and protection from predators. That's not entirely true, according to researchers, who found that the little lizards change color pretty much constantly, and the color changes can indicate their moods. Leaving aside how you might judge a lizard's moods (My tongue doesn't feel sticky today -- sad color!), that doesn't necessarily exclude the idea of color changes for blending-in purposes. Such as: "My mood is not wanting to get eaten, so I think I will reflect that by a mottled mix of greens and browns that coincidentally exactly matches my surroundings and makes it difficult for avian predators to spot me."

-- Thirty years ago today, the Kansas City Royals defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 7 of the "I-70 Series" edition of the World Series. Another layer of playoffs have been added since that time, so the day that represented the end of the 1985 series is the beginning of the 2015 one. As a Royals fan, I am of course hoping for a similar result.

-- Has there ever been a stupider faux-profound ad slogan than the one for the Amazon Echo bluetooth speaker? "I just spoke to the future, and it listened." Taken from a Gizmodo review headline, the phrase embodies negative meaning -- not only doesn't it mean anything on its face, it means nothing when connected to its product. If I were for some reason minded to pay money for a gadget that did what I said when I spoke commands out loud, I would want one that would be really useful: "Find Angie Harmon's phone number. Wipe out Harry Reid's pension. Make Al Sharpton and Bill O'Reilly live in the same two-bedoom apartment and get real jobs." All the Echo does is the same stuff it would do if I pressed the right buttons, without the minimal hedge against sloth of requiring me to press the buttons.

-- Science, which often talks about things in increments of light-years, femtometers and picograms, has some really weird measurements. For example, did you know that you actually receive a dose of radiation from eating a banana, and that the dosage is sometimes used as a basis for measurement? The amount of ionizing radiation is .1 microsieverts per banana, which of course means nothing to most of us who have no idea how much radiation is in a microsievert or in a full-size sievert either, for that matter. This figure is sometimes referred to the "Banana Equivalent Dose." The important number for those of you who enjoy bananas is 35 million, because that's how many bananas you'd have to get together to kill a person with radiation. You'd be in just as much danger from the weight of all that fruit, and in any case would probably have perished quite a bit earlier from whichever beautiful bunch o' ripe banana hide the deadly black tarantula.