<I>Ampulex compressa</I> is a wasp that uses its stinger to temporarily paralyze and then hot-wire a cockroach so that the wasp can "drive" the larger critter home, where it can lay its egg on the roach host and seal it into a nursery. When the egg hatches, the larva chews its way into the host, where it feeds itself and then spins a cocoon.
Beautiful photographs of ghost towns.
Hilarious rant by anthropologist Roger Sandall over Lynn Truss' <I>Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life</I>. I have to confess I haven't read <I>TTTH</I>, not least because I didn't enjoy her hectoring <I>Eats Shoots and Leaves</I>. Geeze, if you're going to write a book about the failure of everybody to observe proper grammar, wouldn't you want it to be copyedited to a fair thee well? Ms. Truss didn't proof her proofer—and all I could think as she wagged her finger was that she should have washed it first.
<I>The British Library </I>vs<I> DRM:</I> The <A HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4675280.stm">BBC</A> reported February 3 that Dr Clive Field, the British Library's director of scholarships and collections, called the increasing restrictions of fair use by digital rights management (DRM) cause for concern.
"If you have no catnip or kibble, you are dead to me."
"Honestly, I have no idea how those CDs wound up on the floor."
Jerome Harris sent in this tidbit, commenting, "Talk about ahead of the curve!"
A good read from <I>The New Yorker</I>. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.
I love these re-imaginings of film trailers. What if the ultimate two-hankie movie was much, much creepier?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks affects how he or she perceives the world. It has been a lightning rod of controversy ever since it was proposed. A new paper suggests that it's half true—sort of.