strange animals traveling in twos and threes

An understandable mistake

Ben — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:08:04 +0000

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)

Hippos

Ben — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:07:29 +0000

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)
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)
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)

Cleaning House (Rundown)

Ben — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:58:46 +0000

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)

Aliens, astronomers, or super-intelligent aardvarks?

Ben — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:22:00 +0000

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

(via Ectoplasmosis)

Respectfully

Ben — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:07:59 +0000

(via bbg)

No related posts.

And now…

Ben — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:31:50 +0000

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

New (Old) Pictures

The narratives of refrigerator innards

Ben — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:11:25 +0000

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)

I can see your brain

Ben — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:12:13 +0000

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])

Language, linguistics, lovely

Ben — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:41:01 +0000

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)

Wait, what?

Ben — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:45:36 +0000

(via Ectoplasmosis)

No related posts.