Entries from April 2007 ↓

A contractor, Johan Huibers, just completed a replica Noah’s ark from the bible. The ark is filled it with life size replicas of animals, and a theater showing the flood story. Huibers plans to turn the ark into a tourist attraction. If you are ever in Holland, in the town of Schagen, you should check it out.
Huibers ark is 150 cubits long. Which is roughly half the size of the ark described in the biblical account of Noah. The pictures on his site are pretty good. If you read dutch(I don’t), you will probably have an easier time navigating it than I did. But even if you don’t read dutch, you should check it out.
I’ve had people describe the size of the ark in the Bible before, but I guess it never really sank in how big it actually was. looking at the pictures of the one Huibers built, and knowing that his ark is only half the size of Noah’s, really sinks the size of the ark in.

Check out the BBC article: Dutchman’s Noah’s Ark opens doors
Johan Huibers Noah’s ark site: www.arkvannoach.com

Miraculin is an extract of the berries from the Miracle Fruit bush. It has a unique property, in that it makes sour food(especially acidic food) taste sweet. Mixing it with a lemon, causes the lemon to taste like sweet lemonade. Kind of a strange trick. Miraculin is interesting in that it itself does not taste sweet. What it does is trick your taste buds into thinking the sour taste in a lemon or other item is sweet.

Ed Felton over at Freedom to Tinker, recently imported some miraculin and wrote an interesting post about his experiences with it. That’s how I got interested in the miracle taste powder and the plant it comes from.

Check out the article for more info and pictures of Ed eating lemons and grapefruit.
Freedom to Tinker: Miracle Fruit: Tinkering with our Taste Buds

For info on the Miracle Fruit plant check out the Wikipedia article and the following article: THE OLD SWEET LIME TRICK

Allen Lee, a high school student in Cary Illinois was arrested after he wrote a violent essay in his creative writing class. The teacher directed her students to write in an uncensored stream of consciousness format. The assignment said, “write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing,” Lee wrote a rather vulgar and extremely violent essay and handed it in to his teacher. The essay didn’t threaten any particular person or group. Nevertheless the teacher was very disturbed by the essay, and called in school district officials for consultation. It was then decided that the police should be called.
Lee was subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct. If he is convicted, he could face up to 30 days in jail and a $1500 fine.
First off, I want to say that I don’t think we should be encouraging students to write essays of the type that Lee wrote. Nor should we be endorsing or condoning it when it does happen. Schools should have rules about this. And punishments, academic ones, should be applied.
But that said, I have a big problem with this whole incident. He didn’t really break any law, and yet he got arrested and very likely will be convicted simply because people are scared of more school violence. He was charged with disorderly conduct, which is all they could charge him with since he didn’t threaten anyone in his essay. Disorderly conduct generally is applied when a public disruption is caused.
In this case the only person who was even disturbed by this was the Teacher, who arguably brought this upon herself by stressing uncensored stream of consciousness writing. If he had written the same outside of school and published it on the Internet for thousands to read, potentially “disturbing” many more people, he wouldn’t have been arrested. More than likely, in that case, no one would even care.
The only reason he was arrested was because he was in a school. It all comes down to his teacher and the school board having more influence than he does. So they have the ability to twist laws and get him arrested even though he didn’t really commit any crime.
So how long will it be before you and I can get arrested for writing or saying something that disturbs people in power above us? I understand why they are worried about this in light of recent school violence, but if they get away with arresting him, they are setting a very bad precedent.
The kid may have been wrong to write the essay, but the truth is that he didn’t break any laws.

You can check out the news story here: MSNBC: Student charged for writing violent essay
And Here: Chicago Tribune: Student writes essay, arrested by police

The city of Liverpool is beginning a campaign to fight the pigeon menace that is plaguing their city. As part of the campaign, they are purchasing 10 robotic falcons to be placed around the city to scare the pigeons away.
The flying rats, as many people are calling them, are all getting fat from eating trash rather than seeds. Their population has also gone through the roof. But rather than killing them, which would seem to be a more logical solution, the city is buying robot falcons to scare them away. I really wonder (sarcasm) how well that is going to work. The robots cost about $4,000 each. So it seems scaring pigeons isn’t cheap.
What I would like to see, is a grudge match between Liverpool’s robot falcons, and the Chinese cyborg pigeons. That would be fun. LOL

Via Popular Science: Robotic Falcons Take on English Pigeons and
BBC News: Robotic birds scare ‘fat’ pigeons

What? You say poodles and sheep aren’t the same thing?
This has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard of. Thousands of people in Japan were sold sheep that they thought were miniature poodles. The “miniature poodles” were sold for $1600, which in Japan is a good deal for a poodle. What is amazing, is that no one noticed until an actress went on a talk show and complained. She mentioned that her new “poodle” wouldn’t bark or eat dog food. After the talk show she was informed that her “poodle” was actually a sheep. After that, thousands of other people started coming forward with their “poodles” saying that they were also acting strange. It turns out that the sheep were lambs imported from the UK and Australia and given special haircuts.
I’m really not sure how you could get taken in by this. Maybe if you had never seen a sheep before you might get confused. But it should be obvious that it wasn’t a dog. It’s not like sheep look all that much like dogs.
I especially like the quote from the police officer, “Sadly, we think there is more than one company operating in this way.” So that means there is a whole crime wave of fake poodle sheep importers. LOL

Check the story out: Dog owners ‘fleeced’ in poodle scam

Update: Despite being picked up by a lot of newspapers, Snopes is claiming that this story is a fake. If so, then this is even funnier, simply because so many news outlets fell for it. Snopes: Sheepish discovery

The cast above was made by pouring plaster into an ant hill. It was made by scientists studying ant colony building. BioOne has the scientific journal paper on the study of the Florida harvester ant. The journal article is a bit dry, and I would even say boring. Of course, I’m not really into ants. So maybe it wouldn’t be that boring if I was more excited about ants. What caught my attention, was the pictures of the plaster casts from the nests. They are really amazing. So you may want to skip over the paper, but you really should check out the pictures at the bottom.

BioOne journal and pictures: The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant

Here is an interesting Google maps mashup. It’s a map of pirate attacks from 2007. The data comes from the IMB piracy reporting center. Looks like Indonesia isn’t a safe place to go boating. Follow the link below to check it out yourself. You can click on each marker on the map to see details about the attack or attempted attack. Pretty cool mashup.

This is the kind of thing that the Google maps API is really useful for.

Check out the interactive map here: IMB live piracy map 2007

There is a study that was just concluded that proves that being smart has a lot less to do with being rich than most people think. The study was conducted by a researcher, Jay Zagorsky, at Ohio State University. His study showed that having a higher IQ meant you were more likely to have a higher income, but also were more likely to be in debt and have fewer investments and savings. So more money coming in, but a higher percentage of that money wasted. People with lower IQ’s were generally in a much better position financially than those with higher IQ’s. They had more savings and investments, and considerably lower debt. Despite having much lower incomes.
This is another one of those studies, that if you have known a lot of both smart and dumb people is not likely to surprise you. Some of the smartest people, academically, that I knew in college were also the dumbest people when it came to common sense. A lot of good financial habits, seem to be just plain common sense. Don’t buy luxury items on credit. Don’t buy things on a whim. Save money. All basic stuff, but it seems like many people don’t get it. Just because you make more money, doesn’t mean you should spend it.

Check out the articles at:
NewScientist: Smarter people are no better off
Scientific American: A Wealth of Smarts Does Not Guarantee Actual Wealth

Jesse England found a way to print film using a standard inkjet printer. He used the Adobe premier to convert his video into a “filmstrip” format. Then printed it on to a transparency using a standard inkjet printer. The film does have to be manually cut out of the transparency, which is kind of a drag. But otherwise this is a really cool idea.

Found via BongBong: Print 16mm/8mm movies with an inkjet
Jesse England’s site with directions: Inkjet Printed Film Process

Astronomers in Europe claim to have discovered a planet that is in the habitable zone orbiting a red dwarf star. This is the first planet that has been found that is warm enough to have the possibility of liquid water. As you probably recall, it was only earlier this month that evidence of water outside of our solar system was confirmed. Now a planet that is warm enough to have that water in liquid form has been discovered. So far, the planet has only been confirmed to be warm enough. So there may not be any water available on the planet, but this is still a big discovery.

Check out the article at Scientific American: All Wet? Astronomers Claim Discovery of Earth-like Planet