Archive for January, 2008
January 28th, 2008 by Odds n Ends
Why is it that strange animal stories always seem to hit at once like a pack of rabid buffalo? It has only been a month and there are already a number of incredibly bizarre animal-related news stories to kick of 2008. It’s like a zodiac year on steroids.
A swarm of 150,000,000 crabs invades an island in Northwestern Australia to mate. Each female crab lays around 100,000 eggs in the sand. They hatch at around the same time, so there might be as many as 75 trillion crabs on that island at once!
Pet Deer Runs Amok: Witnesses eating lunch Sunday at TJ’s Deli in Winston-Salem were startled when they said a woman walking a pet deer on a leash lost control of the animal, causing it to break through a window and run amok through the restaurant’s dining room.
Steaks on the Lamb: They’re searching the woods in the Cincinnati suburb of Colerain Township for an Angus steer that bolted after it was delivered to a meat-packing business this morning. Authorities say a gate on a holding pen was inadvertently left open, allowing the more than 1,000-pound animal to escape.
Man Dies in Crocodile Orgy: Amorous crocodiles are causing so much havoc to a Papua New Guinean coastal community that authorities have ordered a cull. Police on the northern PNG island of Manus asked licensed firearm holders to form a hunting party after mating crocodiles killed one man last week.
Lizard Blood Used as Cure for Aids: Desperate people living with the HIV/Aids virus in Yumbe district, northwestern Uganda, have resorted to an ominous therapy – that of injecting themselves with blood drawn from an uncommon type of lizard.
Man Shoves Hand in Shark’s Mouth: A fisherman who survived a shark attack aboard a fishing boat off Queensland said his skipper put his hand down the shark’s throat to free his mangled leg.
Is the Nevada Humane Society Being Racially Insensitive? The Nevada Humane Society is doing a promotion surrounding the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday called “Black Is Beautiful” where black dogs and cats are offered for adoption at a reduced rate.
California Mourns Death of Crooked Necked Giraffe: Gemina the
January 24th, 2008 by Odds n Ends
Well, it had to happen eventually: the seemingly mighty Church of Scientology finally upset the wrong people and those people have responded in force. Here’s a breakdown of the latest news in the war between Scientology and hackers:
A hacking group calling itself “Anonymous” has posted a chilling video on the internet, announcing that it plans to “dismantle” the Church of Scientology.
Wired.com reports that Anonymous has flooded Scientology servers with a distributed denial of service attack, is choking the Church’s phone lines with prank calls and sending looped faxes of solid black pages.
“Over the years, we have been watching you — your campaigns, your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature. All of these things have caught our eye,” a synthesized voice on the video tells “leaders of Scientology”.-= Anonymous
And from Gawker Media:
Tom Cruise has personally, PERSONALLY, been pwned. This weekend, an anonymous Internet group (named Anonymous
January 22nd, 2008 by Odds n Ends
Despite the protests of animal rights groups Austria’s Supreme Court ruled that, in fact, a chimpanzee cannot be legally considered a person. In a play to ‘give’ the chimp known as Matthew Hiasl Pan monetary gifts of support said groups attempted to have him declared a person.
This chimp and others have been living in a shelter since being released from medical experimentation. Being granted rights as a person would have allowed Matthew to accept donations and thus have a funded life outside of his shelter.
The court’s decision is similar to one made last fall in which a judge dismissed the case, ruling the Association Against Animal Factories has no legal grounds for advocating for the chimp in question. The group attempted to file on behalf of the chimp for bankruptcy protection.
January 17th, 2008 by OddO
Ever wonder what the world really looks like through someone else’s eyes? Representations of the planet have changed with the times as have the people who made them. These are just a few strange, innovative and/or humorous examples past, present and future.
Cartograms such as those above are a way to represent statistical information in visual form, expanding and contracting areas of a typical map to show various kinds of information and a readily understandable format. Above are a map of the world showing resource distribution and a map of American political affiliations. For more technology empowered mapping, see the US’s evolving obesity over time and energy production potential as well as this map of world economic activity.
Ever have trouble finding a date? Well, this map may be for you! National Geographic did a survey and mapped the relative proportions of female and male singles throughout the United States. The result: a relative abundance of men on the West Coast and women on the East Coast, so choose accordingly! Maybe West Coast should spend less time looking at maps of the Star Wars and Star Trek universes and pick up some maps that made history.
Ever wonder what the world looked like 500 years ago? It used to be that high-resolution world maps like the one above were kept (at best) in glass cases in museums or (at worse) were secreted away in vaults. Now antique maps
are readily available to the world via sites like Wikipedia and are changing the way (and resolution) in which we look at the past.
Ever write or draw maps or directions on your hand? Believe it or not this is nothing new. These gloves were created for the 1850 Great Exhibition in London and enabled visitors to easily find their way. Imagine the possibilities of this in the digital age: an ever-shifting GPS-based glove map that changes orientation and location with the wearer!
There have been many attempts to ‘map the internet‘ in various forms and with differing degrees of success. Some of these are more convincing than others, such as the first series above that depicts information transfer overlaid on a world map. Some simply make points about the relationships of key internet players in a familiar way, such as the subway map of the internet. Another curious internet phenomenon: here is a list of places blurred out from Google Earth.
With the past and the present covered, what about the future? Well, scientists have developed a map of what the world is predicted to look like in 250 million years that bears a remarkable resemblance what scientists speculated the world did look like in the equally distant past. This Future World, like Pangea, is a place where all of the continents are again pushed together to form one or two mega-continents. Still want more maps? A great collection of 175 maps spanning 4,000 years is available for purchase.
January 8th, 2008 by Odds n Ends
From subterranean Martians to female hysteria, people have been known to believe some pretty bizarre things. What does it take to make a believable scientific hypothesis out of a strange idea like Hollow Earth theory, what suspension of believe is needed to agree with the Intelligent Design nutjobs
? Apparently, not much. Here are five of the strangest examples and who knows what people will find hilariously untrue from our era in 50 years? Everyone will no doubt have other ideas for what the world’s weirdest theories are so give it a shot in the comments below!
1. Trepanation
Ouch. In one of the oldest known medical interventions, a hole is drilled in the skull of a patient who is suffering from defects such as seizures or migraine headaches. The idea was to relieve pressure in the head which was believed to be causing the ailment. Today, trepanation is used on a very limited basis as a mechanism to access the brain for necessary surgery. Some people practice recreational or spiritual trepanation, presumably because they need modern medicine like they need a hole in the head.
2. Female hysteria
Women in the Victorian age were said to be suffering from female hysteria when they were moody or a little more “difficult” than usual. Fortunately for them, the treatment was something called pelvic massage. We can’t laugh too hard at this one, though. Many years later, it directly caused vibrating devices to be widely available for, um, home treatment.
3. Expanding Earth
As bizarre theories go, this one doesn’t sound that far-fetched. Expanding Earth is the idea that the planet was once a lot smaller and completely covered in one continent. If you mentally shrink the globe and try to fit the continents together like a puzzle, you could almost start to believe this theory
