The Phantom City

The Earth and Moon, as seen from Mars orbit.

Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

Jamaal Tinsley — point guard for the Indiana Pacers and apparently a bad person to party with — and his entourage were shot at after leaving a club around 3:30 AM, possibly with a .223 assault rifle. ESPN paraphrases Pacers’ coach Jim O’Brien with “Tinsley made an error in judgment by being out so late.”

Wow, so the real problem is that after around 3 AM, the streets of downtown Indianapolis are crawling with gunmen looking for cars to shoot? He would have been fine if he went home earlier? Dang, now I’m really glad we didn’t move there.

In other sports news, ex-Falcons QB Michael Vick was sentenced to 23 months in jail for dogfighting. According to the AP, Falcons owner Arthur Blank called the sentencing “another step in his legal journey.” I guess the next step is finding a prison girlfriend? Or maybe it’ll be like My Name is Earl, and he’ll solve prison problems while getting certificates for time off?

Coincidentally — maybe — today’s featured article on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org, at least) is the Brown Dog affair.

Too much pedestal, not enough dog.

Watching nature shows as a kid, one of the things I found most interesting is that apparently every form of life in Australia is dangerous. Sharks, snakes, spiders…even koalas, with their deceptively cute looks and long claws…everything moving can kill you. (Well, except for Michael “Aussie” Southam from ESPN’s Madden Nation. Then again, he could just be lulling his prey into a false sense of security.) My Australian doctor has a poster of the alphabet made up of her native land’s animals; I like to think of it as My First Deadly Alphabet.

India should have had the same reputation with me. After all, there are cobras, tigers, and crocodiles. However, I never thought of it as particularly scary until I read these stories:

First, the deputy mayor of Delhi has been killed by monkeys. Roving packs of wild rhesus monkeys have become more dangerous over time due to their adaptation to the urban environment. The solution? Release “larger, more ferocious langur monkeys” to go after the smaller monkeys. I foresee absolutely no problems there.

Second, a news service is carrying the story of a tree in southern India that eats cows. I’m not saying it exists. I’m just saying you can’t trust the trees either.

So, to recap, if you try to get away from the cobras, tigers, and crocodiles, and you get near a tree, it might try to eat you. If you stay in an urban environment, you are easy prey for roving packs of monkeys being chased by larger roving packs of larger monkeys. Yep, India is now my new Australia.

Links courtesy of Boing Boing, which has some of the best news ever.

Interesting test for whether you use more of your right brain or your left. If you see the dancer spinning clockwise, you’re using the right brain; counter-clockwise, the left. Not sure how accurate it is, but it’s a weird effect.

When I load the page, I can’t help but see her going clockwise. If I just watch the picture move, it stays clockwise. However, about the moment I noticed that the dancer appeared to be…ah…more anatomically correct than you would expect a computer-generated silhouette to be, she flipped counter-clockwise. It takes a bit, but for me looking directly at any detail in the image flips the motion to counter-clockwise. That might actually make sense, given the descriptions of right vs. left brain they use.

Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Many Time, which has a different trigger for flipping the rotation.

And, just for today:

So many spiders….

Actually, maybe they’ll stop the killer bees.

Update: Oh, great. The giant web is the result of different species of spiders mysteriously collaborating. Isn’t that the start of a horror film?

Oops, I broke the planet.

The largest planet we know of outside of our solar system is 1.7 times the size of Jupiter, but it has the density of balsa wood. Or maybe it’s a giant diamond latticework with lots of empty space?

Update: Or maybe it’s a big clump of space dirt?

Astronomers have found a star, zipping through the galaxy at 291,000 miles per hour, creating a tail much like those of comets. This tail, however, is 13 light-years long.

No commentary, except to note that the universe is a wonderfully strange place. That, and it’s good we can see the tail. Otherwise, it would be coming right at us.

Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

Scientists have found that all domestic house cats owe their genetic heritage to the Near Eastern wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica. A quote from the story:

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wild cat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats, and the rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey for her…Seeing she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

And then the children ran out with an angry mother cat attached to them.

Scientists have simulated a mouse’s cortical hemisphere on a supercomputer, running at about 10% of the speed. It doesn’t really have the structure of a mouse’s brain yet, but I suspect with one mouse wandering past the Do Not Enter signs, and one lightning strike, we’ll have an Artificial Mouse Intelligence any day now. Maybe we can use it against the human-brained, cyborg mice?

Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

From The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci:

Since things are much more ancient than letters, it is no marvel if, in our day, no records exist of these seas having covered so many countries; and if, moreover, some records had existed, war and conflagrations, the deluge of waters, the changes of languages and of laws have consumed every thing ancient. But sufficient for us is the testimony of things created in the salt waters, and found again in high mountains far from the seas.