Wild capuchin
monkeys hunt cooperatively, and share what they catch.
Captive capuchins in separate cages will work together
so one of them can get food, and the one who gets the
food will
share
it with the monkey who helped him.
Dave Barry explains the
census,
including why you should fill out the forms, and
answers some important questions:
Q. I have an imaginary friend named Mr. Wookins. Should I include him on my census form?A. Of course. The federal government spends billions of dollars on imaginary programs; these must be targeted to reach the people who really need them.
I've already sent my forms in, vaguely regretting that they only sent me the short form: I'd have liked to at least see what else Congress thought it was important to find out. On the short form, there isn't even room to list the cat, let alone the stuffed animals or the plumbing (which has a life of its own, a fairly active and interesting one from the sound of it).
Wild capuchin
monkeys hunt cooperatively, and share what they catch.
Captive capuchins in separate cages will work together
so one of them can get food, and the one who gets the
food will
share
it with the monkey who helped him.
Nicholas D. Kristof praises the
unexceptional
school. [registration required]
Two fragments
of jawbone found in Estonia and Latvia might be the
missing
link between fish and tetrapods.
He had bought a large map representing the sea Without the least vestige of land And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.
India's wild tigers are in far
worse
shape than India had been claiming: there are between 2,000 and
3,000 left, not the 5,000 the Indian government has been claiming.
Wildlife reserves that supposedly had tigers do not, though tourists
are sold trips to see the non-existent tigers; foreign
conservation money isn't reaching the projects it's meant
for, and no action is being taken against poachers.
Everybody
on the Web seems to have an affiliate program
these days. I've resisted the urge to sign up with my
favorite search engine--I'm fickle about search engines--but
I have succumbed to the lure of
Powell's
Books. If you buy through this link, I get 10 percent;
more to the point,
Powell's is an actual physical bookstore and a fine
place to browse, assuming you have an hour or three to spare
right then, and several more to read what you buy.
Another reason many poor New Yorkers don't trust the police:
people are being
arrested
for trespassing in their own apartment buildings by
police who will neither accept their word that they live there,
nor knock on the apartment door to check. The general outcome
is a day or more in a very unpleasant jail cell, followed by having
the charges dropped; the police are not punished for imprisoning
against whom there was never any evidence. As this column
notes, the police department does not send officers to do random
trespassing arrests in well-to-do white neighborhoods.
[note: Newsday links generally last only a week
before being moved to a pay site.]
When a
co-worker who doesn't keep a to-do list asked me to remind
him next week about a bug fix I need, I used
Mail to
the Future to send the reminder.
Only a word? A lawyer argues that the
placement
of the word "only" in California's Proposition 22
means that it outlaws--or voters might have thought it
outlawed--domestic partnerships and palimony suits between
heterosexual couples. The people who supported the proposition
seem to have wanted to outlaw marriage between two men or two
women, rather than to say that marriage was the only relationship
that could exist between a man and a woman. However, what
they wrote, and what the voters passed, says
Only marriage between a man and a woman will be valid or recognized in California.The author of this article suggests that the discrepancy between what was meant and what was written might be a sufficient argument for overturning the new law; alternatively, a court might rule that the law means exactly what it says, and thus that only same-sex couples may register as domestic partners.
The
AskJeeves pseudo-natural language interface lends itself to
odd questions. Unfortunately, the
answers
tend to make Eliza look like a lucid and insightful thinker.
The current
eruption of Mt. Etna is producing
steam
rings in addition to the more common lava flows.
I started this log a year ago, almost on a whim.
366 days later, I'm still enjoying myself. Like Gertrude
Stein, I feel that I 'm writing for my friends and for strangers:
I don't know who you are, except for the fellow Webloggers
who occasionally please me with a "via YAWL" note in their
logs, but the counter tells me there are dozens of you (or one
obsessive who's coming by 80 times a day--if so, please don't tell me)
and, of course, my favorite Cat.
We all seem to be enjoying ourselves, and I at least am learning
a bit, so Happy Birthday to YAWL, and a happy unbirthday
to y'all!
Marylaine
Block is unhappy about the trend to
rename
solid, well-understood jobs, not because the names don't matter,
but because they do:
My own profession is now in a wholesale flight from the words "library" and "librarian," with a similar loss of meaning; we know what libraries and librarians are, but not what learning resource centers and information specialists will do for us.Words are more than just their dictionary definitions; they have history and public understanding and personal memories attached to them. If you give yourself a more respectable title, you are bound to narrow your self-definition and lose some of those associations. You might start feeling you're too good for some of the scutwork you used to do under the old job title. I notice that the few remaining schools still offering the master's degree in librarianship, not content with renaming the programs and degrees, apparently consider it beneath them to offer courses in basic skills like cataloging, reference and selection.
I finally saw Wit last night. It's wonderful:
well written and well acted, combining humor and pain in a way
that life seems to do much more readily than art, where the
balance is hard to find. I've written
an
epinion, because this play deserves the attention and because
I think a lot of people will enjoy it, and maybe even learn something,
about cancer or about literature.
The
advantages
and disadvantages of syntax, or why we only evolved language
once we had interesting things to talk about.
Demon
Internet has
settled
a libel case that hinged on whether it was responsible for
defamatory material posted to Usenet through its servers. The
company is paying £15,000 plus court costs (which could top £200,000).
An out-of-court settlement establishes no precedent, of course,
but this is
hardly a victory for Internet free speech, in the UK or elsewhere.
The math is intriguing, but there's no experimental evidence to back
it up: extremely tiny
black
holes could be the nuclei of a few--a very few--atoms.
A study of identical twins suggests that there are
genetic
reasons why women, on average, live longer than men. The theory
is that having a choice, in each cell, between two X chromosomes gives
two chances at a good one, whereas males only have one X chromosome.
(As women get older, we're more likely to have the same X chromosome
"turned on" in each cell.)
Male birds have two identical chromosomes, ZZ, while female birds are ZW, and there's some evidence that male birds live longer than females.
If you travel at all, especially if you want to travel
light (as opposed to throwing everything you even might
need into the back of your van), you should have a copy of
Doug Dyment's one-page
packing
checklist. The
annotated
version is useful because it explains when and why you'll need
these things, but the one-page list is what you'll want
to work with when you're packing. The trick is to cross out what
you really won't need--the parka if you're going to Hawai'i, for
example, and the travel clothesline if you're going to be staying
with relatives who have a washing machine--and add
things sparingly. Do list your prescription medicines
specifically, so you don't leave one behind, but think twice before
putting fancy camera equipment on the list. It's appropriate if the
purpose of the trip photographing an eclipse, but in most other
situations you'll wish you didn't have to carry it.
In a
discussion of leaving errors in when editing letters to the editor,
Susanna Sturgis wrote
If your motive is to make someone else look stupid (even if they are stupid), it's not worthy. Don't do it.
The inherent difficulties of
voice
recognition are a consequence of the ambiguities in almost
all real conversations.
[via Robot
Wisdom, for the three of you who don't read it.]
My new
computer wallpaper is a gorgeous picture of M20, the
Trifid
Nebula, courtesy of the
Astronomy
Picture of the Day. They've been overemphasizing NEAR Shoemaker
and its mission to Eros lately, but there's still a lot of good stuff
here.
Thank goodness that's
finished.
The
Coelacanth Rescue
Project is trying to get fishermen
who accidentally catch coelacanths to return them alive to
the deep waters they live in, by providing rescue kits. For
those of us not fishing in the Comoros, they offer an excellent
Web site, with the history and biology of this odd fish, and
the chance to buy coelacanth souvenirs. Where can I put a
replica fossil?
Jon Carroll on
the
increasing incidence of diabetes, and
some of its causes. It's partly genetics--white people are
least likely to be diabetic, and the US population is less
white than it used to be--and it's partly diet:
The corporations are the enemies of the poor, and the poor are dying at the hands of their enemies. Yes, yes, boring rhetoric; true anyway.
Salon has a good article on the problems of
uninformed
consent in medical research: all too often, research
subjects aren't
told even as much as is known about the risks of the studies they
sign up for, and it's too easy to assume that there are no unknown
risks.
We've all been told not to drink and drive. A new study
shows that it can be also dangerous to
think
and drive. People have a limited amount of
attention, and thinking about complicated things--whether it's
trying to remember a route, or arguing with a passenger--is
enough of a distraction to interfere with driving.
The online
Shrine
of Athena would be more impressive if the tour of the
temple
weren't phrased as a text adventure game.
A new
organization wants to
save Iridium by buying
them out and keeping the satellites in orbit, and in use.
It'll be interesting to see if they can raise the money, since
they're talking about an affinity credit card as a major source
of funds.
Fungal diseases
and a shortage of new land for planting could lead to a
world-wide
chocolate shortage.
[via Medley]
For some value of "complete":
plenty of headlines are saying that the "complete" genome
for the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster, geneticists'
favorite insect, has been
sequenced.
Somewhere around paragraph 7, if you get that far, it turns out that
this means "more than 97% of the DNA" and "more than 99% of
the genes" have been sequenced. The remainder is difficult, but
that's okay, it's "not thought to be important."
Hey, boss, I finished the project! No, really, here's the easy 97 percent, and the rest probably isn't important! What do you mean that's not complete? It was good enough for Science.
In all fairness, this probably is a major milestone, but I'm annoyed by the enthusiastic fuzziness of headlines proclaiming "hey, we got it all" and stories admitting that no, actually, we didn't, and we're not going to try to.
Epinions has revised its pay scale, and made it deliberately
ambiguous (to avoid people inflating their friends' accounts, they
say). Nonetheless, I've written reviews of two NYC Chinese
restaurants:
Jade
Plaza in Borough Park, and the Times Square
Ollie's.
Accompany lets individuals
get volume discounts on things like Palm PDAs and
accessories, computer games, and digital cameras. The price
goes down as more people sign up. I just bought a belt case
for my Palm V through them: everyone else wanted $24.95, plus
shipping, and the final price here was $15.95, and no shipping
charge.
Our ancestors,
like modern gorillas and chimpanzees, were probably
knuckle-walkers,
not bipeds. As is often the case in the sciences,
answers just lead to more questions:
other evidence shows that our ancestors were tree-climbers, and
it's not clear how this combination led to bipedalism.
A Web log is a clipping service without portfolio, in which someone collects things she (or he) finds interesting and passes them along. Sort of a primitive version of an anthology: none of the material is actually in the log, all you get is the pointers.
The inspiration for this Web log is Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Web Log, which is well worth a look, and not just because Raphael has been doing this quite a bit longer than I have. Web loggers all seem to read each other's work, but I'm trying not to duplicate too much of what I see elsewhere.
YAWL is broken up into chunks based on size; at the moment that seems to be working out to about two weeks per section. The newest links in each segment are at the top of the page, of course.
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.
