An interesting anatomical feature of some vegetarian animals is that they don’t have upper front teeth. Goats still have 32 teeth just like we do — some of us
— but they’re placed differently. We use our front teeth for biting and the back ones for chewing; whereas cattle and goats have 24 molars and premolars top and bottom to chew with, but their 8 incisors are all attached to the front of the lower jaw. On the top a goat has what’s called a ‘dental pad’
Misty eating windflowers
it’s a patch of tough skin covering the gums.
Goats eat leaves and tree bark and grass. 
While a cow uses her terrifically long tongue to wrap around a clump of grass and her lower incisors cut it off, goats don’t have long tongues and they seem to simply bite the leaves against the dental pad. (Inci-dental-ly, in the picture below you can see that goats’ eyes have rectangular pupils.)
They swallow their food mostly unchewed. 
This behaviour goes back to their wild ancestors’ habit of dashing out from under cover to eat and run back before getting mugged by the neighbourhood meat-eaters. A goat’s stomach has four compartments. The food enters the first, called the rumen, for a short time and then it is pushed back up through the esophagus and into the mouth, where it is chewed and re-chewed. This is cud chewing, and it goes on for hours. 
If you see a goat or cow apparently chewing gum, it is more likely that it actually has cud in its mouth. Cud chewing decreases the particle size of the stalks and leaves, making the chopping function of front teeth unnecessary.
Goats aren’t the only animals with a dental pad instead of upper incisor teeth; most ruminants — sheep, cows, deer and camels — are the same. Horses, like us, are ‘monogastrics’, they have one stomach. Horses don’t ruminate, and like many of us they have upper front teeth. It’s possible to tell what kind of stomach an animal has by looking at its teeth. No upper incisors means ruminant. Cows and goats can lose their teeth after 10 years, a condition known as peg teeth. Since their teeth wear down at a known rate (cows chew at a rate of about fifty-thousand jaw movements a day), tooth wear can be used to deduce age.
A Bad Guide 
Gosh. More fun facts about goats.
Do they really eat just about anything? What is a well-balanced goat diet? Do you have to give them supplements (something, you know, healthy, like waffles or oatmeal or risotto:)? Do they “naturally” avoid poisonous plants (is anything poisonous to them — could they eat poison ivy?)
Inquiring minds want to know.
Ours won’t eat nettles, although a farmer told me they normally do. I don’t know about poison ivy. Luckily it’s not in Norway. They don’t mind thorny/prickly rose bush branches, though (crunch, crunch).
As long as it’s vegetable they’re usually keen, but mostly they eat leaves in summer and hay in the winter. They seem to crave tree bark at certain times, so I chop down a few Christmas trees for them during the winter when they don’t go out much. We give them a supplement in the form of pellets that they really love, they get it twice a day.
They do seem to naturally avoid poisons like rhododendrons, for example. Apparently in the springtime leaf buds on deciduous trees taste bitter or poisonous, so the goats don’t eat them all up — a way that nature protects her young. However, yesterday Misty escaped into the flower beds and ate tulip buds, so it’s not infallible.
They love fruit. Misty licked me all over for nearly half an hour last autumn after I gave her some plums.
They would absolutely go bananas for risotto as long as it’s vegetarian (they can tell if it’s not), so would the hens. They’ve never had it. They love raw oats and they love bread. They know where to find these things in the kitchen too.
A. J. P., didn’t you teach your goats to keep their mouth shut while eating? This is disgusting.
Or maybe it is not disgusting enough. One way or the other you should manage to take a picture of the inside of one goat’s mouth. We don’t see much of their teeth.
(Would they bite you or the camera you think?)
No, see, that’s the thing, they can’t really bite like a carnivore, they don’t have the appropriate gnashers. They might butt me if they were cross, but they’d never bite. They might lick the camera though. They don’t really like me holding it, that’s one reason why I can’t get them to open their mouths very wide. The other is that they only seem to open them properly when they yawn, and I can’t stand around all day waiting for the goats to yawn.
True, you might fall asleep.
By Godfrey, this is an educational blog — I never knew that about teeth and stomachs, or about the rectangular pupils.
Oh, yes. Maintaining your goat is important if you want to avoid it depreciating.
Is it really, really true that the eye pupils of your goats are rectangular? Or is that just an anti-depreciation effect you introduced with an image editing tool?
All very strange. A net search for “rectangular pupils” turns up claims that octupusses have them, as well as horses, and that cat piss glows in the dark. Even the British Telegraph has been affected. They say:
Cuttlefish are the only animals that have w-shaped pupils. Although they can’t see colour, this arrangement allows them to see backwards and forwards simultaneously.
Goats have rectangular pupils to give them better peripheral vision to guard against predators. It also maximises vision in low light, allowing them to feed at night.
The pupils of a frog’s eyes can be horizontal or vertical and round, triangular or diamond-shaped.
No, they really do. I’ll have to find some of my other goat-eye pictures.
Interesting about cuttlefish.
I’d heard that horses have rectangular pupils — and as it happens I took some horse-eye pictures the other day — but it’s much harder to distinguish the black part from the surround with horses.
horizontal or vertical and round, triangular or diamond-shaped — depending on what, I wonder?
It also maximises vision in low light, allowing them to feed at night. I’ve never seen goats popping out for a midnight snack, and I don’t think that’s true. Goats seem to have bad night vision and they’re well-known to be afraid of the dark. Once it gets dark they won’t move from wherever they are.
Well, given that the cyclone that exists atop Saturn is a hexagon, there should be nothing that odd about a rectangular pupil.
A regular 60 degree one?
I don’t think of a four-sided figure as being part of nature, though. Not like a circle; it doesn’t seem very organic.
Yes, a regular hexagon. In crystals you do have very geometric shapes. (Oh my, what a pain it was that crystallography at the engineering school, with all these “cubique à face centrée”, “rhomboédrique” and what not.) For instance look at your nice ice crystals on your window. And for the hexagon, remember the beehive.
JJ, you really need to put a “preview” button in here. Please delete the last comment. Here is the corrected comment, which I validated at Hat’s site with his preview button.
Here’s something even stranger than goats’ eyes. Biologists, zoologists, laymen – almost everyone talks and thinks as a proponent of intelligent design.
Goats have rectangular pupils to give them better peripheral vision
To a hairsbreadth, this is equivalent to
Goats have been given rectangular pupils in order to have better peripheral vision
In books and on talkshows, scientists will mock at intelligent design, yet otherwise they look for explanations of biological phenomena in terms of finality (”what is this feature good for?”). It must hang together with the “operationalist” character of so much research.
Scientists want to find out how to make boats less susceptible to water friction, so they look at shark skin. Pharmaceutical companies want to find substances marketable as therapies for human disorders, so they look at how frogs poison their aggressors. Researchers look for what things are “for” in animals, in order to find out what they can be made to be “for” in humans. The Aristotelian final cause has disappeared from the biological sciences as an explanatory principle, but reigns supreme as a money-making principle. Scientists are concerned primarily with their own patentable “whys” and “hows”. They regard themselves as the best intelligent designers and Makers for hire. “God is dead” and “the world just happens” are subtexts in applications for research funds, providing the motivational background for “but I can fix this for you”.
It’s no wonder that 60% and more of the populations of Germany, America, Great Britain believe that God created the universe (a large portion of these people, in America, believe that this occurred only a few thousand years ago). Apparently few people at large understand “the theory of biological evolution”. It took me a lot of reading to understand it more or less – and by this I mean only the “neo-Darwinian evolution theory” that came together starting about 1930. Darwin himself didn’t understand it, because genetics had not been discovered (1900, when Mendel’s papers of 20 years previously were “discovered”). Darwin accepted that acquired characteristics are inherited, just as every non-religious person did, because there was no alternative explanation on offer. Lamarck didn’t invent the idea, and in fact it was not an important part of what he had to say.
Why do you study crystallography as a structural engineering student? Is it part of the Snowmen & Igloos course or is it to stop stalactites from falling down?
I don’t think I can put in a preview button without paying the wordpress people for it. I may have to decamp to a different service: blogspot, for instance.
How clever of you to test it at LH; I’m sorry it was necessary.
I can’t say I’ve read any post Darwin or neo-Darwinian evolution theory.
There’s a lot more than a hairsbreadth distinction between ‘having‘ and ‘having been given, in order to‘. And even if I decide that the latter is possible — and of course it’s not impossible (within whatever meaning that term would have in such circumstances) — I’m certainly not going to start speculating on “God”, which, it seems to me, is at least a philosophical dead end, whether “He” is “dead”, or not. I’m no more convinced that the goat’s rectangular pupil is a clue to, or evidence of, intelligent design, than I am that an infinite universe is evidence of unintelligent design. Despite that, I like your paradox of scientists (or is it technologists?) redesigning the universe for money; it sounds very Douglas Adams-like.
It’s no wonder that 60% of the population of the United States believes in God; since 40% of its voters elected George Bush and the other 20% has at one time or another been abducted by aliens.
And, to tie the two themes together, don’t houseflies have hexagonally laid-out eyes, with even better peripheral vision than goats?
The distinction that is not one, is between “they have … to give them” and “they have been given … in order to have”. As you say, “having” and “having been given, in order to” are not the same thing. But that is not what I was saying. So there.
I’m not sure having a bunch of hexagons at my visual periphery would help me recognize, and avoid, an attack of wild honeycombs.
When I told Ralf about your rectangularly-pupilled goats, he expressed concern that you have been allowing them to watch too much television. The idea was weighed whether someone should report you to Animal Watch. I said, JJ is a man of honor. If I place a bank account number on his desk and leave him alone for an hour, he will do the honorable thing.
but that is not what I was saying. So there.
I’ll reread it. I’ve obviously not quite yet reached 100% brainpower this morning.
If I place a bank account number on his desk and leave him alone for an hour, he will do the honorable thing.
That’s right. And to prove it, tell Ralf to send me all his credit card codes.
I wonder what a fly in a honeycomb would see?
It’s one of the dogs who watches too much television; but he’s fourteen and a half, and retired.
Can you imagine what is meant by the claim that the w-shaped pupils of cuttlefish allow them “to see backwards and forwards simultaneously”? You don’t by any chance keep a few cuttlefish around for observation, in addition to being company for the goats?
It sounds to me like terrible phasing — as if I said that I can see towards left and right simultaneously. They probably just have 360 degree vision (just?), and I cannot believe that a W-shape is necessary for it; you don’t see flies walking about in W-shaped sunglasses. Anyway, what distinguishes a W-shape from an M-shape apart from it sounding slightly more exotic?
I must admit that I’d always thought of a cuttlefish as a dried object sitting in a parrot’s cage, but maybe God designed them with something else in mind.
When is Ralf sending his credit-card info? I haven’t got all day.
I’m afraid Ralf had to fly to Seattle on short notice. He was offered a lucrative consultancy in the uses of television to genetically modify the eyes in couch potatoes, to improve their advertisement uptake. He presented your research results on rectangular pupils as his own. I told him that’s dishonest, but he just muttered something like “that’ll get his goat” as he ran for his flight.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just send his pin codes.
Well, they do it a strange way in France. To become an engineer you have to study for five years. The first two years are préparatoires. I don’t know what they are meant to prepare you for (or against), but they prepare you. You do all sorts of things you will never hear about again during you whole life, and even after, but at least you are properly prepared. It’s only after that thorough but useless preparation that you start the serious stuff — bending moments if you are in structures (or in astrophysics maybe), amps if you choose electricity, mouse if you are in informatique —, for three years. Hey, they are Cartesians, aren’t they?
Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-034
March 27, 2007
Pasadena, Calif. — An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission.
[…]
Bizarre Hexagon
Now what is “bizarre” about that hexagon? It looks like a perfectly nice hexagon to me. there’s nothing bizarre about it. That’s what’s weird.
I blame killer bees.
I wonder if the hexagon is related to a certain liquid-flow phenomenon known as Rayleigh-Benard convection, in which convection cells can form that are hexagonal. I know about this from Morin’s La méthode, where it is given as an example of how organisation can appear spontaneously in disorder.
I’m interested in the idea of Final Cause — that you mention, and I wasn’t aware of (I’ve never done any serious reading of Greek philosophy) — being applied to science in general, not only biosciences. I don’t like dividing, or passing on to others, moral responsibility for something like inventing atom bombs, because it means that no one takes responsibility in the end, and scientists blithely carry on doing damage.
The idea that acquired characteristics are inherited seems so idiotic that there must be more subtlety to it than appears in Wiki. It says
It doesn’t go on to explain what actually was happening, which is too bad.
The goat eyes look more like diamonds to me, with 30° and 60° angles, but maybe it’s just the camera angle that makes it look like that. Forty-five degree angles don’t look quite natural to me.
In other news, someone has identified the gang that has taken over the apartment above me–they are Dragons (a spinoff of the Latin Lords) and their symbol is a diamond. That explains some of the new gang signs in the alley. (The landlord has given them 10 days notice.)
I don’t know. The thing about regular hexagons is that they’re the only figure above a four-sided one to fit together without interstitial spaces (regular pentagons fit together with each other but only with smaller square shapes in between, etc.) but they’re more stable than a square grid. That’s why the bees chose them for honeycombs, I guess, and it may have something to do with why the Rayleigh-Benard thing is composed of hexes.
I found this, explaining why hexagons provide the most “economical tiling” of the plane. Elsewhere, I find the claim that there is no regular (= equal-sized) hexagonal tessellation of the 2-sphere. At first, I thought this couldn’t be true, since obviously you cover the 2-sphere with exactly two regular polygons with any number of sides: namely by taking a great circle as the polygon. Trouble is, great circles are circles, not polygons. I had imagined a flat polygon placed like a belt around the sphere – but a flat polygon doesn’t lie in the curved surface of the sphere.
Anyway, I was imagining that the Saturn hexagon may be an upward or downward, 3-dimensional convection phenomenon, having nothing to do with tessellations of the surface.
Yes. Does Saturn have an atmosphere?
*Thinks:
How did we get from “Goat Mouth” to “Does Saturn have an atmosphere”? That would be a stretch even at LH.
Saturn is an atmosphere and nothing else, so far as I know – a “ball of gases”.
As to getting from goat’s mout to Saturn having an atmosphere, that’s an easy one: rectangular goat pupils -> eyes -> bee eyes -> hexagons -> Sig’s post of Saturn hexagon. You know that “Erdös index” (I think it’s called) about how many people there are in a row between you and anyone else, where each person knows (in some sense) the predecessor and successor person? Supposedly on average the index is 6 or 7.
There’s no reason why this should not be the case with “ideas” in memory. Memory is an associative faculty, in fact it’s best seen as a generative competence, not as a “repository of facts”. In a repository of dead facts, how would the repository owner ever find anything? You have to start talking about “association of ideas” in the owner, but then how would this work? The real problem is in the repository metaphor itself. If memory is conceived as a machine producing networks of ideas, the need to explain the clueless repository owner vanishes.
I really must try harder to avoid seeming to be schoolmarmy. For “is best seen as” please (!) read “is perhaps more usefully thought of as”.
“A person’s Erdös number is the length of the chain of co-authored publications linking that person to the prolific mathematician Paul Erdös. ” (He was famous for co-authoring things.) I think it’s Geoff Pullum who has an Erdös number of two.
If memory is conceived as a machine producing networks of ideas
I see the advantage, but I like to think I’m in control of assembling the networks. For the same reason (lack of flexibility), I don’t especially like built-in furniture.
I don’t see you as a schoolma’m.
AJP: Does Saturn have an atmosphere?
Of course it does. It is mainly formed by an atmosphere, though it might have a core surrounded by “metallic hydrogen” like in Jupiter.
What is strange though is that its South and North Poles are different. It’s true that Poles are not always identical (some of them can be singularities when they become the Pope, the only one), but on Saturn the North Pole is hexagonal as mentioned above while the South Pole is nearly as impressive since it has a massive cyclone fitted with an exceptionally deep eye — but not a square one.
I, for one, am going to miss the mariachi tuba. You won’t, though.
I would never trust a planet whose poles didn’t match.
On planet Earth you do have Poles that match perfectly though:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,378418,00.html
Apparently the notion of a “machine” is not to your liking. But I guess you are thinking of one of those artificial contraptions which tick away doing repetitive things, and are utterly unable to maintain and reproduce themselves, and never die only because they never live.
Apart from humans and other life forms, there are innumerable very strange, self-maintaining machines around. Consider the billions of suns in the universe. Each one is a gigantic machine producing every element heavier than hydrogen, and most of the available energy. They maintain themselves in an antagonistic, dynamic combination of nuclear-fusion explosion and gravitational implosion, over millions of years. Or consider atoms, which are orchestrations of subatomic particles, and in which mutually repelling protons are constrained to coinhabit a nucleus and electrons are constrained to keep their distance. Atoms are component machines in larger molecular-chemistry machines, which humans are too, though that is not all that they are.
What is this “control” you say you want to have? I bet you don’t seriously care about the notion of “control” over your memory, since you don’t need control to memorize and remember things. Notions such as “freedom” and “control” are starched collars that most people are accustomed to put on in certain discursive situations, but are not needed in everyday life. Here’s something you might want to try out – just don’t use the words “subject”, “freedom” and “control” any more, nor their opposite numbers either. You may well find, as I did, that nothing goes missing. Nothing substantial changes, but there is a subtle yet profound shift in the way things appear.
Medical science has been providing us with primitive mechanical replacements for a long time. Now, more and more, it is learning to learn how to use non-primitive mechanical components, such as stem cells. Science fiction films have for umpteen decades been getting us accustomed to seeing ourselves as machines – but not of the trivial kind. The film figures are sometimes described as cyborgs or androids, but who is fooled by this? Remember the main figure in Blade Runner? To say nothing of Tic-Toc and Sponge Bob.
Buy one, get one free!
You may be right that I don’t like machines, although I do admire them, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. Half the fun in life is the kick you can get from being able to assemble your own thoughts. There might be more efficient ways of assembling my thoughts than just leaving it up to me; however, I don’t feel like delegating the job to machines. Call me selfish, but I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to have a machine eat my dinner for me, either.
There’s an apparent irony that I heard Stephen Fry mention the other day, which is that human happiness is not conducive to getting the soul to tick over and produce … whatever. If that’s the case — and guilt being a function of both happiness and the human spirit, so I’m not being entirely selfish here — I will stick with trying to be happy.
The police seem to think they will not be gone in 10 days or in 30 days if the landlord has to give them legal notice. They say more like 6 months since that sort of person knows all the angles. Now I’m beginning to remember the last person who had multiple visitors up there, at an average of about an 8 minute visit each, going on to 5 in the morning. She was involved with the guys who did the drive-by shooting two summers ago when a guy was killed a half block from where I was teaching that summer. Apparently the worst case scenario is that the rival gang, the Latin Kings, sees them all outdoors at once and starts shooting. It’s true the gangs here can’t shoot straight and they don’t care if there are children and babies on the street when they start. Always some innocent honor-role student is getting killed. And that’s only one of my current crises, as you may be able to tell from my new (temporary ) IP. Hopefully I will be back blogging in time for our birthdays. I shall certainly toast your birthday if you will toast mine, and perhaps the time in between as well. Any thoughts about which poison to imbibe?
I regret not visiting earlier due to travel, but I too have a dental pad. (One was also mentioned in a Hardy novel, probably “Jude the Obscure”). With no front teeth I can eat almost anything except carrots, other crunchy vegetables, and nuts.
By which I mean “no upper teeth”. Our Wobegonian dialect is unique and confusing.
I was beginning to wonder if you’d taken off for Boston, but yes, champagne’s always a good choice. Unfortunately, tea is more likely at this end; alcohol makes me too sleepy to get any work done. I’m the younger, June 8th, you’re May the whatth?
June 6
What, you’re only two days older than me? That’s incredible. I knew it was close, but not that close. Did you tell me the exact date before and I’ve just forgotten? My memory is really going downhill if you did.
The goats can eat carrots, John. I don’t think you’re really trying.
yes, drat this library timeout nonsense.
Ah, now I’ve got no idea what you mean about the library. Is this something else I’ve forgotten?
So sorry for all the cryptic comments. I wrote a long comment several days ago, then when I tried to submit it, it said I had to submit a proper email address. Alas I had a space in it somewhere. But when I did a backpage the whole comment was lost, and the library where I was working only allows so much time before it cuts you off. In that case it shut down a half hour before closing time, and I only had time to read my mothers emails, order a new computer, and clear the spam out of my blog, then try a brief comment on only one blog. Hmm, perhaps shorter comments would be in order for a while.
Yes, we exchanged birthdates once, both being Gemini, but I was convinced you had made a pact with the Dark Side since you appear much younger than your true age, and it took time to convince me we were born the same year. Also I have reason to remember your birthday as that was my father-in-law ‘s birthday too, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t remember mine.
I have several crises going at once, but none that cannot be solved with money, or solved faster with more money. My travel plans, such as they are, have been delayed by at least three more days, but I still hope to make Boston before summer session. If it happens I would be driving past LH’s neck of the woods.
Champagne, yes excellent choice as a birthday toast.
Eeekk, 15 minutes remaining and no online spellcheck editor.
Here they have been known to put a fresh strawberry in the champagne. but I’m afraid I prefer tea these days as well, coffee makes my hair too curly. I have sage tea (the sage leaves imported from Jordan) and fresh mint tea from the garden, the leaves being propagated from some mint leaves one of the mosque ladies had from a plant from Amman (I don’t even want to know how she got a live mint plant past customs). You will find all the Arabs here have quite excellent mint plants in their gardens that you cannot obtain in the local nurseries.
But for the birthdays, I think I could manage half a glass at least before nodding off.
yikes, three minutes left, and hopefully not too many typos.