fun
clock | August 14, 2009Bing Haubrich has made new friends in Japan, but they want to keep him there. In fact, they have threatened to hold him for ransom unless his American friends and family do two things:
1. Answer questions about Japan/Nippon culture and cuisine.
2. Donate money to help his mother pay the plane fare for his trip.
It's tempting for a young man to stay in Japan, because so far he has found the food to be awesome and the shopping (even in vending machines) to be, let's say, "unique." In fact, the Japanese students think that if he stays long enough he could use his ninja powers to be Emperor…
clock | August 12, 2009...and I'll blow the straw house down. And the sticks house down. And, wow, the brick house down as well! Yummy little pigs!
awild | July 2, 2009(a) current distribution of Sasquatch (b) Sasquatch distribution post-climate change
For those of you dallying around about how seriously to take the threat of climate change, here's something for you. If we don't cease our emissions of greenhouse gases pronto, Bigfoot will invade Arizona and Utah. I'm serious.
awild | June 28, 2009Well. I'm off to host a photography workshop. But in the meantime I can't resist passing along this video. In honor of Michael Jackson, of course.
ht: nyt
awild | June 24, 2009...when I disappeared to Argentina recently, I was with my wife.
Here she is, collecting ants in the mountains near Tafà de Valle:
photo details: Canon 17-40mm f4.0 L lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 400, 1/250 sec, f11.0, with circular polarizer & gradient filter
on-camera fill flash
grrlscientist | June 20, 2009Get Your Sexy Name
But I actually like this name better;
Get Your Sexy Name
But I am such an amazing lover that, when I give the generator my full name -- "GrrlScientist" -- it blows up! But when I give it my name in bits and pieces, it gives me this (see above the jump for the first part of my name);
Get Your Sexy Name
clock | June 13, 2009He is the BBC's latest star - the cab driver who a leading presenter believed was a world expert on the internet music business.
The man stepped unwittingly into the national spotlight when he was interviewed by mistake on the corporation's News 24 channel.
With the seconds ticking down to a studio discussion about a court case involving Apple Computer and The Beatles' record label, a floor manager had run to reception and grabbed the man, thinking he was Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, a specialist internet publication.
Actually, he was a minicab driver who had been waiting to drive…
clock | June 12, 2009Sorry, could not resist posting this:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview
awild | June 11, 2009
Image by Flickr user traviswilcoxen
Tomorrow morning I leave for a week at the Archbold Biological Station in the scrublands of central Florida. Archbold is a magical place filled with charmingly unique plants and animals. I spent a summer there in 1995; this will be my first visit since then. With any luck I'll return with a pile of new photographs. On the list to shoot: the Florida harvester ant, Platythyrea punctata, and a couple scrub endemics like the graceful Dorymyrmex elegans.
I've pre-scheduled a few posts while I'm away so the blog won't go quiet, but I may be slow…
clock | June 10, 2009
I guess that is it's purpose. The very first pic I took with the new iPhone. Around the corner here in Chapel Hill.
awild | June 3, 2009...to the quiz.
1. Myrmica fracticornis undescribed species
2. Tetramorium "sp. E." (formerly, T. caespitum)
3. Lasius neoniger
4. Tapinoma sessile
5. Myrmecina americana
6. Pheidole pilifera
Most of these were straightforward, but the Myrmica and the Lasius required as much luck as skill to pick correctly given what was visible in the photographs. The Lasius is indeed covered with the fine hairs that distinguish L. neoniger from L. alienus, but these are nearly impossible to see against the white backdrop.
Identifying Myrmica to species requires examining the shape of the base of the…
clock | May 28, 2009It appears that Jorge Cham has been reading some of these posts or associated FriendFeed threads, because today's PhDcomics strip is this one:
I am wondering how many of 'weissberg's' comments have been removed by the moderators over the years.
Also, if duplicate comments are posted 14 years apart, is it because MoveableType stalled that long? Do they even count as duplicates any more?
And why did the reviewer take so long to post the review? And how does one get scooped by a 14-year old paper? Just the lack of habit of reading historical literature?
Task: identify the paper this is…
clock | May 27, 2009Last week also demonstrated another benefit of Open Access. Not just that everyone could re-use the images from the Ida paper without wondering "is this too much for Fair Use principles?" (yes, I have seen people re-post every single image from the paper into their articles/posts, plus lengthy excerpts of text), but people could do fun stuff to them as well, and even use it for commercial endeavors.
And I am not talking just about the Google logo last Wednesday!
First to make a creative reuse of an article image was Ed Yong in his brilliant and hilariously funny post Darwinius changes…