Archive for the 'Living World' Category

Why do We Find Things Beautiful?

21/09/2007

I understand why we find other people beautiful (or not), it’s a rudimentary method of picking a suitable mate, or at least cutting the numbers down significantly. This obviously has survival implications reproduction implications. I also understand why we find babies (and other animals with similar traits) cute, it increases the likelihood we [...]

Hunting Poachers

7/11/2005

Trust me, folks, if you think some of my previous posts come from some random direction, you’re in for a surprise, because I think I may have surpassed myself.
Let me take you back to what you were doing on 7th August 2003. I honestly haven’t got a clue what I was doing, but in [...]

Shark Spotting

9/10/2005

And you think your job’s bad. These guys are trying to put a tag on a great white shark.
Recently they discovered a great white migrated from the southern tip of South Africa all the way to the west coast of Australia, a distance greater than any other fish has migrated. They think it [...]

Angry Squid

1/10/2005

You may have heard about the historic photographing of a Giant Squid in action at nearly a kilometre below the surface by a couple of Japanese researchers recently. Well, one thing they managed to do was break off a length of tentacle about 5.5m in length (it got caught on their squid trap thing [...]

Memory Macro

25/07/2005

One of the things I remember reading in one of Cory Doctorow’s short stories was about a ‘bugout’ (that’s an alien) who has a motorised exoskeleton that has macros for doing common tasks, things like opening the car door, starting the engine, that sort thing, rather than telling the motors step-by-step each time. I [...]

Spider Bites

11/05/2005

You can blame one of my work colleagues for this post. She sent round an email with photos of a bite from a Brown Recluse spider. A rare affect of the spider’s venom is called Necrotic Arachnidism, which basically means the infected skins dies. It only happens in about 10% of bite [...]

Big Bucks

14/04/2005

Kottke has a link to another interesting article. This one concerns the difference in earnings related to height, weight and beauty (which goes some way to explaining why I earn so little). There are some big charted differences. I would like to point out, however, that the conclusions that Kristie Engemann and [...]

The Female Form

4/12/2004

Now, before I start, I realise that this post could be interpreted as sexist, offensive, or just make me out to be some sort of pervert. I don’t mean to offend anyone, so should it do so, I can only offer an unconditional apology.
Men stare at women; it’s an open and well-known fact. [...]

Flower Power

14/09/2004

Another interesting one from the BBC. Maybe now you’ll look at weeds in a different light?
I think anything that introduces the word figwort back into common usage has got to be good news, the fact that it may be able to stand up to the seemingly unstoppable MRSA bug is no bad thing either [...]

Helping Mother Nature

26/08/2004

I realised today that my car has become part of the cycle of nature.
Plants use a variety of ways to spread seeds; they grow fruits to encourage animals to eat them and spread the seeds through their excrement, or make seeds that get caught in fir and feathers, they use wind, water and numerous other [...]