A Penguin in a wetsuit…dreams do come true


That’s right: Pierre the penguin has just received a customized wetsuit commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences after shedding (primarily butt feathers) left him too cold to play with the other penguins. More details here, but all you really need to know to sleep better at night is that somewhere in the world is a penguin with his own customized wetsuit.

April

Since I’m in Minnesota, I shouldn’t be surprised that it snowed yesterday or angry at April (seeing as the only month during which Minnesota has NOT seen snow is August), but I am. So I decided to find other reasons not to hate April, and discovered that this month is:
Autism Awareness Month
International Guitar Month
Keep America Beautiful Month
National Child Abuse Prevention Month
National Frog Month
National Garden Month
National Humor Month
Mathematics Education Month
National Poetry Month
Stress Awareness Month
In honor of the penultimate distinction on this list, I think it’s appropriate to share a wonderful poem by Michael Ondaatje:
“Application for a Driving Licence”
Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.
I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.

Comparing politicians to computers…


God Obama must be hella overpriced pretty full of all kinds of snobbery and ego…
Whereas Hillary just breaks a lot. So if Linux runs on both, who or what is that?
Oh I got it! Linux is the democratic party and the republicans are type-writers.
Analogies rule.

"Wild Octopuses Have Complex Sex"


“A male octopus (right) deposits a sperm packet into a female in this photo taken during a field study and released on Monday.”
The headline really says it all. According to National Geographic (April 3), a recent study has “found that wild octopuses engage in ‘jealous murders,’ gender bending, and once-in-a-lifetime sex—unlike their seemingly shy, unromantic captive brethren.”
The study was done by the University of California, Berkeley; scientists watched the “baseball-size Abdopus aculeatus octopus species” (found off Indonesia) several weeks and recently published their findings:
“The team witnessed picky, macho males carefully select mates. The octopuses would then guard their newly domesticated digs jealously—occasionally going so far as to use their 8- to 10-inch (20- to 25-centimeter) tentacles to strangle romantic rivals to death.
“‘This is not a unique species of octopus, which suggests others behave this way,’ said Berkeley biologist Roy Caldwell, who co-authored the new study.
“The researchers also observed smaller males put on feminine airs. Some would keep their brown stripes—a male trait—hidden, perhaps to lull females into a false sense of safety before setting the scene for ‘seduction.'”

Interactive anatomy


The “Visible Body”:http://www.visiblebody.com/ site is probably the coolest web 2.0 thing we’ve profiled in a while. On this site you can interact with human anatomy in a way that really was never possible before. Using intuitive controls and an easy to navigate menu system, anyone interested in just how our bodies are put together can learn the whole thing from phalanges to the xiphoid process (pictured below) at the very end of the sternum. Did you know there are 206 bones in the human body?

Once logged in (which you have to do with Internet Explorer) you’ll need to install a plugin from “Anark”:http://www.anark.com/downloads/download_1.aspx and then wait a tick to download all the various bits and baubles that make up our bodies. There are a LOT of bits and baubles in the human body. This may all seem like a huge pain in the ass but in the end it is worth it. The level of detail and interactivity with what is apparently a very accurate anatomical model like this is just plain mandible-dropping amazing. It’s almost enough to make me want to go to med school. Almost.
To read about some fantastic things we humans do with our bodies, check out the “human tricks”:http://duenos.net/article/human-tricks category. Thanks yet again to the lovely people at “Infodoodads”:http://infodoodads.com/?p=293 for finding this gem of a resource.

Rules of Thumb

In the movie “Boondock Saints”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0144117/, one of the main characters makes a feminist gaffe by referring to a something as a “rule of thumb.” A woman who overhears him gets pretty irate and cites a “since debunked”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb#Origin_of_the_phrase rumor that the origin of the term comes from a British judicial decision and if memory serves me correctly, punches him in the face.
Whatever its origin, a rule of thumb is a useful and easy to learn guide not to be taken literally. Every field uses rules of thumb in some way and this very useful “website”:http://rulesofthumb.org/ has some of the best. For example, here are two rules picked from disparate fields:
Anthropology:
??The number of people occupying a house in a preindustrial culture can be estimated at one person for every ten square meters of enclosed dwelling space.??
Astronomy:
??You can describe the location of objects that are low in the sky by holding your hand in front of you at arm’s length. With your palm facing in and your pinkie on the horizon, the width of your hand covers 15 degrees of arc above the horizon.??

Internationalisation of sport

!http://duenos.net/images/alex/OpeningSeriesJapan.gif!
As many of us were groggily hitting the snooze alarm for the 2nd or 3rd time this morning, the first pitch of the 2008 Major League Baseball season crossed the plate at the Tokyo Dome, home to Japanese powerhouse “Yomiuri Giants”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Giants. The Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics have been touring Japan for the last week playing exhibitions against Japanese league teams but this morning’s battle was the real deal with the two American League teams bringing in the new season in style. The game took ten innings but the defending champion Red Sox pulled it out 6-5 thanks to a Manny Ramirez two-run double in the last.
If you want to learn more about the game I suggest you take in the volumes of information being offered at “MLB.com”:http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/opening_series/y2008/index.jsp, but the reason I included this post today is that I think it’s very cool that Major League Baseball decided to play its opening games in Japan this year. This is just part of a trend of internationalisation happening in American sports that I’d like to see continuing. Last year we also saw the Super Bowl champion New York Giants play at “Wembley Stadium”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_Giants_season#Week_8:_at_Miami_Dolphins in London and an increased presence of very good “non-American players”:http://www.nba.com/players/international_player_directory.html in the NBA.

Becoming a Master… still

So my Masters paper, or at least a solid draft of it, was completed sometime last semester. Why then, you ask, have I not posted it all over the web in some sort of glory-kidnapping extravaganza? Have I become a little more modest in my old age? Heavens no! Am I perhaps realizing that most professional academics don’t study something considered as non-serious as Facebook? No, actually it in fact makes a superb recipe for interesting conversation. No, I’ve come to a bit of a crossroads. Over time the paper grew forth from a number of sources and managed to expand its borders to take over all kinds of areas and interests, some more effectively than others. I’ve come to a point where I have to split apart the front section, which is largely theory-rich and reads much like an area exam, from the back half, which is data and statistics derived from the two year study of usage and privacy. Now the task is to do this gracefully and with any luck the survivors (or at least one of them) will earn me a degree.