A reply to a question in Notes & Queries yesterday recommended purchasing lion and tiger urine from Chester Zoo to stop neighbourhood cats from urinating in a vegetable patch (G2, page 17). Chester Zoo would like to forestall requests for its big cats’ urine: it asks us to make clear that it does not in fact sell either tiger or lion urine. Many years ago the zoo sold elephant dung, but it no longer does.

(via Regret the Error)

1. Of course there’s always debate about invasive species, but usually… Well, usually you don’t think hippopotamus, not in the same mental grouping as zebra mussel and starling.  But apparently we live on a place where that can happen; where Colombian drug lords decide to create a haven (of sorts) for hippos; and where, even today, the problem lingers.  (NYT, via MeFi)
2. But who’d hijack a hippo?  Probably no one. But maybe you want precautions in place, just in case: 
   

   The crate was hoisted onto the flatbed with a 120-ton construction crane. For security reasons, there were no signs on the truck indicating that the cargo was a hippopotamus, the zoo said.

     (WaPo, via Schneier)

3. But it’s not all fun and games.  (Actually, part of #1 is already treading into the not-fun-and-games category, if you read into it.)  Sometimes hippos fight sharks.  At least in Italian natural history books from the 60s, maybe.  (via Tetrapod Zoology)

• It turns out computers can figure out what language you’re speaking without actually hearing you.  In at least some controlled circumstances, anyway.  (NewScientist, via Monochrom)
• “Astonishingly”, (1) people forget their passwords all the time, but (2) the ever-helpful “secret” “questions” are not really either — at least, not as far as security is concerned.
• If I had a car I needed to get into on a regular basis (as in, for driving), this would be wicked awesome.  It’s not everyone who can open a car with his shoes.
• And this video montage is just kinda sweet.
• This post is a good example of why I’m recently drawn to reading Tetrapod Zoology on a regular basis.  The lead-in sentence (I think) sells itself:
  

  I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that ‘dinosaurs’ had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.

  Read on.

• I am still waiting for these business cards made out of meat to get real.  (No, not like that.)
• Without having perused it much, Ficly at minimum stands out as an interesting concept — a place for collaborative story-telling (in a time & place where social networks are, weirdly, moving us away from that kind of collaboration).  (via SimpleSpark)

You decide. Whatever the case, it’s kind of amazing.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

(via bbg)

Went away.  Came back.  Pictures. You know how it is.

This falls into the category of things that are uninteresting in real life, but which become interesting through the act of photography. Or something. (It may simply be that the photographs aren’t accompanied by the rank refrigerator smell that’s always lurking, waiting for the right moment to assault your nostrils.)

The photos are accompanied by brief descriptions of the households they represent.

(in GOOD Magazine, via The Morning News)

Of course, movies have known for years that this was possible–it’s just taken reality a while to catch up.  Yes, science can see images in your brain, although for now it’s seemingly mostly proof-of-concept, and fairly limited.  (No full color perfect simulacra of your dreams, yet.)

“Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.”

(Via Pinktentacle via Monocrom; also, the complete journal article is available online in PDF format: Neuron: “Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders” by Miyawaki et al. [11 Dec 2008])

A sort of extraordinary exercise in control of voice and facial expressions, in the form of a Judy Garland impression, of all things. From the ever-impressive Amy Walker:

Related to something I could have sworn I’d posted previously, but apparently haven’t: 21 accents in 2 1/2 minutes.

(via BoingBoing)

(via Ectoplasmosis)

The future:

…which is even stranger when you consider that it’s predicting the release of itself.  Stay tuned.

I’ve been playing around on the preview, and while I’m not as impressed as I was by the initial (guided/rehearsed) demo searches, I’m still mighty curious.  As long as WolframAlpha survives, it certainly won’t get worse.  And there are already some interesting types of calculations it can summon.

There’s a whole world of math and physical usefulness, but much less so in the biological world, so far.  Is my impression.

We’ll see.

Two tidbits from NewScientist:

1. Robots have made their first independent scientific discovery (i.e., made its own hypotheses based on data it was given, and then tested those hypotheses);
2. The internet might soon (or already) be self-aware.

If I had a wall large enough for this (and didn’t have the wall covered with dry-erase board), this graphical representation of the internet-as-subway would certainly be an excellent contender for posting.

Which is a too wordy way of saying, this is awesome.

You can theoretically put in to order one when they’re printed, but good luck with that; they’re only printing 1,000. A lot and not.

(Also, they do have a hi-res version available for the downloading. So if you were feeling particularly energetic, and not at a loss for toner, you could rasterize the image, print it out on however many 8.5×11″ sheets of paper it takes, and assemble it yourself…)

Let The Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

It’s been a long while since I’ve read anything this wonderful, engrossing, or disturbing.  It’s been years since I’ve read anything this good.

Let The Right One In is everything that you think it is, and nothing that you think it is.  Vampires, you think.  Well, you’re right.  Sort of.

If you’re coming across this title completely unawares: Let The Right One In is, more or less, the story of friendship between an ostracized almost teenager and a young-seeming (but very old) vampire.  What stands out, aside from the quality of the writing and the fantastical element of vampires (which is actually not heavy-handed for 95% of the book) is the believability of the story.  People act like you’d expect them to act, and are, if not fully realized, at least compelling characterizations.

It’s a story of friendship and loneliness, and of suffering and depravity (and of identity and anonymity) — but in all the wrong places.  Not wrong, necessarily, but unexpected.  Which is to say the story takes your expectations and muddles with your brain.  Makes you wonder.  Surprises you with what you already know.  There’s much in the story to find disturbing, but it doesn’t always come from the places you want it to come from, if you can want it to come from anywhere.  “Expect” is a better word, but not the right one.  The story doesn’t always lead where you’d hope. When it does, maybe you wish that’s not what you had hoped.

Let The Right One In makes you wonder about people, like you always do.  Makes you think.  Believe.  Wonder.

There’s not much that can be said without giving away the progression — the learning — of reading through the book, or watching the movie.  Lindqvist adds some interesting details to the science of vampires: curious asides that, for all their apparent insignificance, only work to strengthen the narrative as a whole.

Having come to the book by way of the movie, I feel like this is one of the few instances where neither the book nor the movie let the other down.  Both perform exceptionally; having seen the movie, the book still surprised me.  Changed my impressions, but without diluting the impact of the movie.  The book and movie are different in many ways, but they complement each other extraordinarily well.  They’ll bear re-reading & re-watching.

I loved this book.  I expect a long drought before I find something as interesting, challenging, and satisfying.

We accidentally referred to a “stellar sea lion” (29 November, p 6). The featured mammal is a Steller’s sea lion.

All in good time, all in good time.

(via Regret The Error)

I like Youtube as much as the next fellow, but for me it hasn’t really become the time sink that it easily could be.  That said, I think Vimeo may be my Youtube…  There are some really amazingly put-together videos hanging out there.

This, for example, is amazing:

But this one is really good, too. And this one.

I don’t know why, but I actually feel good about having only seen 10 of the things on this “Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced on the Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.” Admittedly, the 10 I’ve seen were pretty good.  (Well, eight of them.  Well, seven.)

But who doesn’t love a good list?

Newspaper article about Wikipedia errors turns out to have its own factual errors… and the author of the piece then posts an explanation… on Wikipedia.

(via Regret the Error)

Particularly when it includes things like this.

(via BoingBoing)

“I actually hate cotton candy,” Bellan said. “It’s disgusting. I won’t eat it.”

But on the other hand, the stuff’s apparently got potential as far as the growing human tissue goes.  (And, no, it’s not exactly new.  Not super-new, anyway.)

(via Monochrom)