I can’t say I knew who Eric Wight was a few minutes ago — evidently he’s an animator — but I stumbled across his site, where he has concept art for Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Animated Series. I guess the show never got off the ground.
He also has concept art for: Batman Beyond, Austin Powers, Charlie’s Angels, etc.
How I Joined Teach for America — and Got Sued for $20 Million tells a harrowing tale. Joshua Kaplowitz’s first warning should have come from this bit of advice:
As the tour ended and I was about to leave, Mr. Bledsoe pulled me aside. “The one thing you need to do above all else is to have your children under control. Once you have done that, you’ll be fine.”
I increasingly believe that everything in southeast Asia — or everything edible — comes from fish. Thailand Bakery Adds Fish to Ice Cream fans the flames of my ichthyophobia:
Specialty ice creams can be concocted from soy milk, olive oil and even cheese. But for the truly bizarre, come to central Thailand where a bakery is putting snakehead fish in its frozen desserts.Kaesara Bakery’s ice cream contains 40 percent fish meat, but you wouldn’t know it from the smell, taste or texture. The bits of fish could easily be mistaken for coconut flakes
No wonder I hate coconut — it tastes just like snakehead fish meat!
This kind of story always creeps me out. Landlord Finds Years-Old Corpse:
The death of an unemployed Slovak man went unnoticed for nearly two years until his landlord broke into his apartment to evict him, police said on Wednesday.The tenant had not paid rent on his flat in the central Slovak town of Lucenec since March 2001. Tardy payment and eviction warnings had all been returned unopened.
Accompanied by police, the landlord discovered the renter’s desiccated corpse on a mattress in the flat, a police spokeswoman said. Neighbors of the dead man, who would have been 54, had not noticed his disappearance as he was reclusive.
According to Sea Lions Alex and Zachary Guard U.S. Ships, the Navy is using sea lions to catch suspicious swimmers and divers near ships:
The sea lions have been trained to carry a special clamp in their mouths which they can attach to a suspicious person, Commander John Wood, Special Operations Officer Naval Forces Central Command, told Reuters.The clamp is attached by a line to a flotation device which marks the swimmer for security personnel to apprehend him. Wood would not explain in detail how the clamp worked or what would stop a swimmer removing it.
I don’t know why, but that clamp scares me. Anyway, I don’t normally think of sea lions as deep divers, but:
The mammals can dive to 1,000 feet, swim at speeds up to 25 miles per hour, as well as see and hear better under water than any human or mechanical device the military has.
Any phylogeneticists in the audience should read Madagascar Mammals Traced to African Ancestor. It summarizes a recent Nature paper:
Madagascar’s carnivorous mammals are descendants of a mongoose-like creature that floated to the island from Africa on a raft of vegetation about 21 million years ago, scientists said Wednesday.
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According to the research, carnivorous mammals are not old enough to have been present on Madagascar before the split with Africa, and if there was a land bridge other species probably would have crossed it too.
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“In fact, all 100 or so known species of terrestrial mammals native to Madagascar, which fall in four orders — carnivorans, lemurs, tenrecs and rodents — can now be explained by only four colonization events,” he said.
Humans Taste Good to All Lions, Not Just the Sick:
Humans make an attractive meal for all lions and not, as had traditionally been believed, just old and infirm animals unable to catch faster-moving meals.
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The two most famous man-eaters, who killed and ate nearly 30 people as they built a bridge over Kenya’s Tsavo River in 1898, were found to have broken teeth.
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The Tsavo lions [...] led scientists to claim dental problems were often behind attacks on humans, by making it hard for lions to bring down their normal prey.However, after examining the teeth and jaws of 23 “problem lions” killed by rangers outside the borders of Tsavo East National Park, zoologist Bruce Patterson found that less than a quarter had damaged teeth.
According to Scientists Identify Genetic Marker for Longevity, a certain patch of mitochondrial DNA is unusually common in folks who live past 100:
In a study conducted at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, researchers found that centenarians [people over 100 years old] were five times more likely than others to have the same mutation in their mitochrondrial DNA.Mitochondrial DNA, the portion of DNA located in the mitochondria or “powerhouses” of the cell, passes only from the mother to offspring.
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In the study of a group of 52 Italian centenarians, the researchers found a common mutation in the same main control region. Looking at mitochondrial DNA in white blood cells, they found that 17 percent of the 52 had a specific mutation called C150T transition, compared with only 3.4 percent of 117 people under the age of 99.
The European Space Agency’s StarTiger team has developed a new imaging technology. Space camera blazes new terahertz trails explains:
Terahertz waves occupy a portion of the spectrum between infrared and microwaves, from 1011 to 1013 Hertz.Until now, this has been an unexplored part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, terahertz waves are very interesting as they possess characteristics of both their neighbours: terahertz waves can pass easily through some solid materials, like walls and clothes, yet can be focused as light to create images of objects.
The imager built by the StarTiger team takes pictures at two frequencies, 0.25 and 0.3 THz, to create a two-colour picture to create a contrast between materials with different transmission and reflection properties.
The main advantage of a terahertz imager is that it does not emit any radiation; it is a passive camera capturing pictures of the natural terahertz rays emitted by almost everything, including people, rocks, water, trees and stars.
The Onion strikes again. From The Future of NASA:
In the wake of the Columbia tragedy, many are questioning the wisdom and necessity of NASA’s manned-space-flight program. What do you think?“The space program should be scrapped. Fourteen deaths in 20 years? Imagine seeing those kinds of statistics in, say, the trucking industry.”
— Bill Kuntz, Auto Mechanic
If you haven’t seen Adaptation yet, go see it. One of the characters, as Fake Sibling Earns Oscar Nomination reports, is up for an Oscar:
Donald Kaufman is a rarity among Academy Awards nominees this year or any year: He doesn’t exist.Charlie Kaufman, a previous nominee for “Being John Malkovich,” created make-believe twin brother Donald to share the writing credit for “Adaptation,” and both were nominated Tuesday for adapted screenplay.
It seems that unsustainable population growth won’t be a problem — at least in Japan. For Ailing Japan, Longevity Takes Bite Out of Economy explains:
Japan is wrestling with an unprecedented demographic time bomb. With the average woman bearing 1.33 children, the government projects Japan’s population will start declining in three years. By around 2007, the proportion of the population over 65 will have jumped to 20% from 10% in just 21 years, a rate of graying that’s nearly twice as fast as any other major nation.
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With the world’s longest life expectancy — 85 for women, 78 for men — Japan’s society is aging faster than any other now. But by midcentury, the populations of Italy and Russia are expected to have declined even more drastically. Even China, the world’s emerging economic powerhouse and most populous nation, will age rapidly starting in 2010, with the elderly making up 22.7% of the population by 2050, up from 6.9% now, according to the United Nations Population Division.Such jumps in age, coupled with declines in fertility in virtually every country, have led at least one expert to predict that, after zooming ahead in the next 50 years, the world’s population could begin to decline. That marks a reversal of long-held predictions of unsustainable population explosions.
Why does it not surprise me that Stonehenge was built under Swiss supervision? From Stonehenge ‘King’ Came from Central Europe:
The construction of one of Britain’s most famous ancient landmarks, the towering megaliths at Stonehenge in southern England, might have been supervised by the Swiss, or maybe even the Germans.
How do we know (or suspect) this? Because “The King of Stonehenge” came from the Alps:
The so-called “Amesbury Archer” was found in a grave about three miles from the landmark, buried with 100 items, including gold earrings, copper knives and pottery.Researchers hailed the find — dating from about 2,300 B.C. and the oldest known grave in Britain — as one of the richest early Bronze Age sites in Europe.
He was dubbed “The King of Stonehenge” because of the lavish items found in his grave, including some of the earliest gold objects ever found in Britain.
It was tests on the enamel of his teeth that revealed he was born and grew up in the Alps region.
“Different ratios of oxygen isotopes form on teeth in different parts of the world and the ratio found on these teeth prove they were from somebody from the Alps region,” said Tony Trueman from Wessex Archaeology.
According to New ‘Brain Fingerprinting’ Could Help Solve Crimes, scientists can measure involuntary brain activity that registers recognition — in some cases, of things only a criminal would know about a crime:
Brain fingerprinting works by measuring and analyzing split-second spikes in electrical activity in the brain when it responds to something it recognizes.For example, if a suspected murderer was shown a detail of the crime scene that only he would know, his brain would involuntarily register that knowledge. Under Farwell’s system, that brain activity is picked up through electrodes attached to the suspect’s scalp and measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG) as a waveform.
A person who had never seen that crime scene would show no reaction.
The great novelists not fit for duty in this war of words explains how free books are being handed out to soldiers:
War is Heller. It is also Tolstoy, Owen, Vonnegut and Hemingway, among many others.But according to the Pentagon, war — at least the impending war in Iraq — is Shakespeare, the 5th-century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and two modern bestsellers about heroism and wartime correspondence. Before Christmas the US Defence Department began distributing free, pocket-sized copies of these books to its troops, to ensure that soldiers are improving their minds while removing Saddam. More than 100,000 copies have been given away so far.
The project, set up by a group of publishers with charitable support and Pentagon help, is a deliberate echo of the mass distribution of paperbacks to American soldiers that took place in the Second World War; the largest handout of free literature in history. In 1942 the US War Department hit on the idea of the Armed Services Edition, books specifically for servicemen in the field. The books were cheap to produce, horizontal in format, oblong-shaped to slip into an ammunition pouch, with large print to be read by candle or torchlight and cover designs resembling film posters.
It’s almost enough to get me to join the military. Almost.