awesome things this article said
“their eyes are chock full of weird cells and structures that let them distinguish between no fewer than 100,000 colors — ten times more colors than we can see.”
“They catch other animals by either spearing it through the heart or smashing it to pieces. Unlike most predators that grab prey, these pummel it and destroy it. When they interact with each other over a burrow, they use their armored front appendages and smash each other on the face. Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can’t pick these up. They’re really great animals to have around.”
“Knowledge is a fundamentally good thing: learning more about the world is intrinsically valuable, because it adds that much more depth and nuance and color to our experience of life.”
11 months ago
because he likes bikes!
aug 9, 16, and 23 he’s closing park ave (plus the streets it turns into, 6.9 mi of road total) for 6 hours to cars so only bikers and pedestrians are allowed.
i’m going to bring my bike into the city and bike! you should too. if it works well, he said the city is going to keep doing it. SWEET.
more info
1 year ago
PLEASE EAT CHOCOLATE, SAVE THE AFRICANS!
so, if you haven’t heard there’s a food crisis in the world. people can’t eat cause foods getting more expensive and scarce. now, we know you could ignore it if you wanted to, A&P is right around the block filled top to bottom with food. food crisis? what the hell is she talking about??? anyway, this article isn’t about the food crisis. it’s about the mapping of the cocoa genome. Mars (maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s a huge chocolate company…they make m&ms, twix, starburst, snickers, etc) is launching a 5 year project to map chocolate genes. (yes, not only can they map human genomes, they can map chocolate’s too.) see the prob is that climate change (GLOBAL WARMING), pests (no not your younger siblings), and diseases are destroying cocoa. and as i’m severely addicted to chocolate, that’s a problem and I wrote to Mars about fixing that shit. not really, they kinda realized the issue on their own, but if they waited any longer, i was gonna write. in any case they say that “the goal is to deploy the most advanced tools of computational biology to discover the genetic building blocks of traits like disease and pest resistance, drought tolerance and perhaps flavor.” so they’ll be genetically enhancing chocolate to be even tastier, but, get this, they will also be saving lives. Cause of 6.5 million people are cocoa growers, about 70% of them live in Africa. so, what you have to do is KEEP EATING CHOCOLATE to make sure africans stay employed. and don’t worry about getting fat, you can always go to the gym. plus, now when you get yelled at about being unhealthy eating chocolate, you can just say “i’m doing it for the africans.”
here’s where i got the info: HERE
1 year ago
Among many other things I did today (around Amsterdam) I visited the Old Church. There was an impressive photo exhibit: World Press Photo 2008. Super cool photos. Of course better huge and in the real, but here’s the link to the site:
Overview
and make sure to check out: the several pictures of Bhutto. I really like the one where she is adjusting her veil and the one where we see the back of her addressing the crowd with one arm pointing in the air. and definitely look at these super cool see creatures: beautiful!
really, all of them are fabulous, so try to go through them all. and make sure to read the captions.
1 year ago
Don’t you hate it went you waste time playing stupid online games when you could be doing something more productive? Well, don’t feel so bad, especially if you’re playing Tetris (or something similar). Turns out Tetris can make you smarter. Scientific American reports “Past studies have found that when people play Tetris initially, they use more glucose, suggesting that their brains are working hard. Over time, though, glucose usage returns to normal. In other words, the brain has to work less hard the more it practices. It becomes primed to solve related problems quickly.” Julian Lyles Bass-Krueger (a high school student from New York) found in his small study that playing Tetris prepped you to ace tests like the IQ Test. “He had some of his several dozen subjects play Tetris for 15 minutes. Then he gave everyone a spatial reasoning test similar to those used in IQ assessments. The results were staggering: Tetris players scored more than 55% higher than the control group.”
Read full article at: http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-entry/Sciam-Observations/Tetris-Makes-Smarter/580000919
1 year ago
This is really interesting. First play the video with you eyes open, then try it with your eyes closed. Hear a difference?
Scientific American explains:
“So this week I’m taking it back to a study published in Nature in 1976 to tell you about a freaky auditory illusion called the McGurk effect. However, it also requires some visual input, so I’ll have to send you to a video at http://snipurl.com/sciam-illusion (or simply click to play the video posted below this transcript.)
If we watch a video of a person mouthing the word “ga,” but have a synced voice-over of that person saying “ba,” what we end up hearing, is a third variation that’s never been said! That word is “da”.
And even though you now know it’s an illusion—you will still, when you see the video, think you are hearing “da”. But if you close your eyes, and do not see the person’s lips forming the word “ga,” you’ll hear what they are actually saying, which is “ba”.
We think of speech as dependent on auditory perception. But this study eerily shows just how important visual input is.
From this, it’s clear that our senses did not develop in isolation, but rather, they work in tandem to form an accurate perception of our world. Here we learn that the position of the lips is key in accurately hearing what someone is saying.”
1 year ago
