.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

June 23, 2005

Are you my mother?

I got this as an email forward and I thought it was really cute, I apologize if you've already seen it. Usually by the time these forwards make it to me everyone and their mother has already seen it.

NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.

The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.

"It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother'," ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.

"After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together," the ecologist added.

"The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother," Kahumbu added.

"The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years," he explained.



June 22, 2005

Freaky Fruit

Yesterday, being the first day of summer, I was greeted by a coffee cake and a platter of fruit when I got to work. There was also a sign that said "Welcome Summer! Let's all eat fruit!" These are the times that I really like working here. Among the normal fruits (grapes, strawberries, blackberries) was an awesome looking Horned Melon. (the five year-old in me likes to call it a horny melon)



This guy (also where I got the picture from) says it better than I could but basically, the horned melon looks, on the inside, like mucus and tastes a bit like grass. I once, in an adventurous mood, bought a horned melon and brought it to a cookout. I don't remember it going over too well.

Another fruit in the looks really weird and doesn't taste all that great category is the rambutan.

These are some rambutans from a fruit stand in Hong Kong. The obsess.com guy has a humorous review of why he thinks these things look extremely unappetizing. The inside meaty part of the fruit is really slippery and reminded me of biting into a disembodied eyeball, gross. Also, the taste reminded me vaguely of processed coconut, which I don't like.

So, in summary, strange looking fruit => tread carefully.

Scientists really aren't that mature

The pictures:



The story:

Steve (pictured above) received as a gift from his mother a cactus (also pictured above). Originally the cactus was straight up and down, however, it seems with years of care, or lack there of, Steve has managed to create this incredibly embarrassing house plant. He then decided that it would be appropriate for the work environment and now keeps it in his office on the window sill. He revealed that once a year a ring of small red flowers blooms around the tip of the cactus.

The best part is that when someone sees it for the first time it's almost impossible to look at directly. You just have to avert or cover your eyes. Many have exclaimed in shear terror "It's looking at me!" Soon after come the ribald jokes and the suggestion that perhaps two smaller cactuses next to the first just might go perfectly. All I can do when I see it is shake my head and say "that's just so wrong!"

How could 100 magazines be wrong?

Some random things i came across while catching up on my blog reading. Hopefully I will become more exciting in the future.

Here's silly study (via Dienekes') run by scientists with not enough to do, proving what everyone with a shred of common sense already knows. Men think that women want muscle bound men that can't force their arms to hang by their sides, and women think that men want runway model size zero thinness. And magazines perpetuate these misconceptions. Ok so maybe not everybody is duped by the magazines but I get the feeling that there are an awful lot of people who are. So is there a check on this runaway self image propaganda? Perhaps, perhaps not, one thing that I'm fairly certain of, is that there will never be a correct answer to "do these pants make me look fat?"

The real question is how do you get the job of sitting around all day looking at magazine pictures? Sounds like not a bad way to make a few bucks.

In a somewhat related vein here's another post from Dienekes' about what people find attractive. Apparently, women like heroes (no big surprise there) but while doing stupid things to get a girl's attention can sometimes be endearing, doing stupid dangerous things is not. Such as picking fights or drag racing. Do any girls find that attractive?

What confuses me is that the abstract refers to dangerous sports as a "non-heroic risk" but doesn't exactly explain what it means by dangerous sport. Are we talking Ultimate Fighting or Skydiving? I'd have to say that Ultimate Fighting is decidedly less attractive than Skydiving. Both carry a certain amount of "non-heroic" risk and it can be argued that being good at ultimate fighting has some sort of evolutionary advantage. Perhaps it's because I feel that skydiving, though it's scary as hell, isn't really all that risky.

June 20, 2005

Baby Cheetahs!

On Saturday morning Brian and I joined his parents for a Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) trip. I wish I had brought my camera with me. I was sad that the new Cheetah cubs weren't out yet, their public debut isn't until this Saturday, but you can see pictures here. Watch out, Catherine, your head may explode from the cuteness. There are several webcams for the cheetahs as well, but they don't seem to work on my computer here. Luckily, neither does the naked-mole rat camera, man those things are ugly.

June 16, 2005

The Evil Sickness of DEATH

Symptoms:

Cure:

Result:
Four days of pure misery, only to come back to work on Wednesday and get totally stressed out because that work that you pushed off Friday afternoon to do Monday, is now really late. Damn.

Last weekend was not the best weekend of my life. But, I am slowing getting better and I still have lots of bad pun popsicles which along with sushi seemed to be the only things I could enjoy eating. I've finally stopped giving secret evil eyes to the woman at work who gave me this DEATH illness. And my headache is almost gone (I hope). The downside is that I'm afraid I might have given it to one of my other coworkers, who had to go home early today.


*seven after one

Hopefully not falling down drunk

This is a bar that completely appeals to my drunken sensibilities. No more of those other bars mocking me with their standing abilities, I see them laughing at me as I totter down the street after a particularly heavy night. You'll get yours you straight edged bars with good posture, I will be mocked no longer. Here is a bar that understands me!




My sister, Vicki, sent these pictures out last night. I have no idea where this bar is, but I'm going to go with my brother's guess of Krakow, Poland. I'd love to see what the inside looks like!

UPDATE: Chris has found the building. It's apparently in Sopot, Polland and is apparently not a bar at all but a business-office center! Chris also lets us know that it is here on the map.

June 09, 2005

An incredibly scary thought

At lunch today my boss was talking about a discussion he heard on NPR where they were talking about a woman playing a videogame through an implanted neurochip. I tried to search for a recording of the program but was unsuccessfull. He did say that the research was done through DARPA. So I went searching for similar research and found that there are indeed researchers working on the brain-machine interface and that if what my boss heard is true, it ain't that long before some really scary sci-fi stuff becomes reality.

Take this research project from the University of Michigan, for example, they've figured out a way for a neural implant to send signals to control assisted living machines, and this was back in 2000.

Next, I have this article from CNN in 2001. The researchers have successfully planted a chip in monkeys brains that can control a robotic arm, 965 Km away! The article goes on to say that the next step in the research is to create a feedback loop from sensors on the arm so that the monkeys can actually feel the texture of say an apple that they've caused the robotic arm to pick up.

I also came across this site willing to send you something that apparently reads the bioelectric patterns from your mind with a finger sensor. They have several games on offer including a flight simulator, a drawing program and something called FIB that appears to be some sort of lie detector program. Of course it could be a scam, but I believe everything I read on the internet.

Here's a guy with a chip in his brain that can control his computer and his TV. He can literally think emails to people.

Here's an article about a bionic eye for the blind, basically you have a camera that sends the visual info to a small processor that then does it's little magic and sends info on to a tiny implant behind your retina and then on directly to your brain. Enabling the blind to see.

Why is this scary? Think of what would happen if we could hook up one of these neural chips to the internet and get feed back through sensory inputs like the bionic eye. We could not only surf the net in our heads but also control robots remotely. Computer aided ESP. Eventually we wouldn't need the sensory inputs and just get information directly inputed into our brains a la Matrix ("I know Fung Fu!") I realize that's a huge leap but it does seem to be getting closer.

Now, think of the possiblities for terrorism. This is where it gets really scary. Viruses downloaded directly into our brains. Maybe not even that far. Can you imagine the the effect that propaganda could have when it's automatically piped into your head? Suddenly, a certain Star Trek enemy doesn't seem all that far fetched.

Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated.

Wining in Millwood

Last weekend Teresa, Naomi, Brian and I went to the Vintage Virginia Wine festival. A wonderful way to spend a nice sunny Saturday. A bus drops you off in a huge field filled with little tents serving mouthfulls of every type of wine imaginable. Although, the vast majority of the tents were dedicated to making the many revelers drunk enough to buy more wine than they intended (Brian bought 9 bottles I believe) there were a few tents selling concoctions of the more spicy variety and reaping the same inebriation benefits. There was the Chili Man with a variety of salsas, the sauces tent selling cooking sauces like the teriyaki that Naomi bought, and about 10 different places selling "Outback" hats. There was also many many people with these handsfree necklace wine glass holders.

This is a disaster waiting to happen because as it keeps the glass hanging around your neck, it does not necessarily keep the wine in the glass. There was one woman with a red wine stain covering about half of her white tanktop.

Brian and I came prepared for the ride home with the ingredients for some very warm rum and cokes. Things that stand out for the rest of that night are dropping a piece of Tunnel of Fudge Cake that Brian and I had made the night before on the kitchen floor and bringing out my silly hat collection yet again, cause it wouldn't be a party without it. Things I don't remember doing are, cleaning up the floor after dropping the cake and eating anything. I was not feeling good for my 10 am and 90 degree soccer game the next morning.

June 02, 2005

X & Y

I'm currently listening to the new Coldplay Album X&Y. Not sure how it is that my "contact" got ahold of it since it seems that it's not supposed to hit stores in the US until Tuesday next week. However, it's pretty much what you would expect, nothing ground shaking, your typical Coldplay output as far as I'm concerned. But, it's enjoyable. I do really like the guitar heavy bonus track called "Til Kingdom Come". Chris Martin's voice is a lot lower, not his typical high wailing voice he uses so often.

I'm quite a bit partial to Coldplay on account of the fact that they're music will probably always remind me of driving through Tasmania in a huge Land Cruiser, attempting not to be hit by a wicker ball from the Eisch Kleicker game in the back as well as keeping a look out for Tasmanian Devils in the road ahead. Our fearless leader, Simon (also a professor for just about the coolest class I've ever taken), was obsessed with Coldplay at the time and we got to hear Parachutes over and over again for the week that we were in Tassie. Not a bad way to spend Easter break as far as I'm concerned.

June 01, 2005

Viva Italia!

Italy pictures have finally made it up! Enjoy them or despair!

More pictures are here:

Brian
Naomi
Teresa
Sara

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?