Archive for the ‘animals’ Category
A Fish-Powered Vehicle
March 10th, 2009
I’m a little late on this one. A few years ago the artist Seth Weiner created a vehicle controlled by the motion of a goldfish. I can only assume that this man makes his living doing things like this, which makes me insanely jealous.
animals, art+design, computer science, science | 1 Comment »
Bill Pickett
February 10th, 2009
Bill Pickett (1870-1932) was a cowboy with a very particular talent:
“He invented the technique of bulldogging, the skill of grabbing cattle by the horns and wrestling them to the ground. Pickett’s method for bulldogging was biting a cow on the lip and then falling backwards.”
He worked his way up from performing at county fairs to touring with the Wild West Show. He was eventually kicked to death by a horse.
A Bilateral Gynandromorph
February 8th, 2009
The world is crazy. The cardinal pictured above is a bilateral gynandromorph, which means it has both male and female sex chromosomes. This is the bird equivalent of a hermaphrodite. Not only is this bird’s coloration divided, but if we were to open it up we would find an ovary on the right and a testis on the left.
Here’s the blog entry which first brought this phenomenon to my attention; here’s an article describing it in more detail (skip to page #15).
Elbowed Squid
January 8th, 2009
All cephalopods are pretty terrifying, but some are more terrifying than others. This footage from an underwater Shell drilling site really needs to be seen.
The Gävle Goat
January 4th, 2009
Since 1966, the town of Gävle in northern Sweden has yearly built a giant straw goat to celebrate Christmas. And arsonists almost yearly set the goat on fire.
The vandals and policemen engage in an annual struggle to decide whether the goat will live or die, and the vandals usually seem to win out. Here’s a timeline mentioning some of the more entertaining incidents in the goat’s history:
- 1966 Stig Gavlén came up with the idea of a giant goat made out of straw. The goat stood until 12:00 PM that New Year’s Eve, when it went up in flames.
- 1968 The goat survived. Until this year there was no fence around the goat and it was popular for children to play hide-and-seek inside and around the goat. Also, it is said that one night a couple made love inside the goat. As a result, in subsequent years the inside of the goat has been protected by a chicken-wire net.
- 1970 The goat burned down only six hours after it was assembled.
- 1971 Tired of arson, the project is abandoned. Schoolchildren build a miniature. Their little goat was kicked to pieces.
- 1972 The goat collapsed because of sabotage.
- 1976: A car crashes into the goat.
- 1979 The goat was burnt even before it was erected. A new one was built and fireproofed. It was destroyed and broken into pieces.
- 1988 Nothing happened to the goat this year, but gamblers were for the first time able to gamble on the fate of the goat with English bookmakers.
- 2006 The Southern Merchants’ goat survived New Year’s Eve and was taken down on 2 January. It is now stored in a secret location.
- Mixed together and edited with material from wikipedia and the bbc.
And, yes, the 2008 goat was also burned.
The Moose Test
December 11th, 2008
Automakers put their cars through many tests to assure that they’re safe. Among these is the moose test, which measures how well a vehicle can dodge a suddenly appearing obstacle on the road – for example, a moose. The test generally replaces an actual moose with brightly colored cones, which in my opinion ruins most of the excitement of the thing.
Unsurprisingly, it was originally developed in Sweden by Saab and Volvo, since their vehicles tended to be most at risk for moose-related accidents.
The Incontinent Duck
November 14th, 2008
The eighteenth century was a golden age for clockwork contraptions (see The Turk (sort of)). One of the more renowned creators of these devices was Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782), a French inventor and bureaucrat most famous for his Digesting Duck.
This remarkable duck ate food from an exhibitor, swallowed it, digested it, and, yes, produced excreta. Voltaire thought that this contribution echoed the glory of France. It was similar in size to a duck, drank water with its beak, quacked, could rise up and settle back on its legs, and, most amazingly, it swallowed food with a realistic gulping action of its flexible neck.
- Cognitive Science, Jay Friedenberg and Gordon Silverman
Lamarckian Genetics
July 29th, 2008
In the high and far-off times of the 1790s, O Best Beloved, there lived along the shores of the great green greasy Seine River a biologist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
Lamarck was one of the first scientists to explain the differentiation of species by evolution. In his version, traits that parents acquired during their lives were passed along to their children. Thus, a giraffe that had to stretch to eat the leaves at the tops of trees passed down its lengthened neck to its offspring, and a talented human musician who practiced very hard would have more musically-inclined children.
This was some pretty clever thinking for the time, and fit in neatly with the later Victorian passion for self-improvement. Once Mendel & Co. determined the actual mechanism of genetics, though, the whole thing kinda broke.
Some of Lamarck’s ideas were revived in the 1930s in the Soviet Union as Lysenkoism, the theory of genetics upon which the USSR based its agricultural research. Famines resulted. =(
A Thousand Cows
May 17th, 2008
It’s time to talk about Yajnavalkya, a legendary Indian sage:
“King Janaka of Videha once performed a lavish sacrifice and distributed many gifts. Many wise men from Kuru and Panchala attended the ceremony, and Janaka wanted to know who was the wisest among them. So he drove a thousand cows into a pen, and between the horns of each cow he fastened ten gold coins. Then he said: “Venerable brahmins, these cows are for the wisest among you. Let him take them away.”
None of the other brahmins dared to speak, but Yajnavalkya said to his pupil Samashrava: “Son, you can drive these cows home.” “Hero of seers!” his pupil exclaimed joyfully, and drove them home.
The other brahmins were furious. “How presumptuous!” they shouted. And Ashvala, the royal priest, asked: “Yajnavalkya, do you really believe you are the wisest of those assembled here?”
Yajnavalkya replied: “I salute the wisest, but I want those cows.” “
- The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
A Paper Moose
March 1st, 2008
Robert J. Lang is a truly brilliant origami artist. He does it with math.
His galleries are spectacular.