boojum.cat - Slashdot User

Aussie Scientists Find Coconut-Carrying Octopus 205

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @02:40PM from the concealed-carry-in-australian-waters dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. ... 'I was gobsmacked,' said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. 'I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.'"

Comment Re:Missing Option (Score 1) 703

by boojum.cat on Sunday October 18, 2009 @06:21PM (#29787547) Attached to: Where Should We Focus Our Space Efforts?

I was trying to be insightful, rather than funny, but I'll take what I can get. If space isn't used to improve life on earth in some way, it's pretty much useless.

Comment Missing Option (Score 5, Funny) 703

by boojum.cat on Sunday October 18, 2009 @02:29PM (#29785665) Attached to: Where Should We Focus Our Space Efforts?

Earth.

Comment Re:DEFINE: Subjectivity (Score 5, Interesting) 834

by boojum.cat on Monday July 27, 2009 @02:06PM (#28840845) Attached to: Are Women Getting More Beautiful?

Similarly, before the industrial revolution it was unfashionable to be tan, since being tan meant that you were working out in the fields. After the industrial revolution, it became fashionable to be tan, because that meant that you weren't in a factory all day.

Comment Re:1984? (Score 1) 513

by boojum.cat on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @03:22PM (#26817123) Attached to: False Fact On Wikipedia Proves Itself

Also, "Encyclopedic grade writing" has always been pretty terrible. My relatives still have some Britannicas from 1986 in her house, and you wouldn't believe the raw obviousness of some of the mistakes in them, even judging by the knowledge of the time. Encyclopedias have always been freshmen essays into complicated subjects they do not know enough about. The advantage of wikipedia, while no more authoratative, is that hundreds of people with direct experience can correct and expand the articles, whereas traditional encyclopedias are written by staff writers with limited knowledge and stay wrong forever.

That's not true. Look for a copy of the 11th Edition of the Britannica. We found the 1915 edition, in reasonable condition, in a used bookstore for less than $200. Many of the articles were written by the top scholars of the day. Of course, it's not so good for most 20th century events.

The Presidential Portrait Goes Digital 295

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 15, 2009 @10:21AM from the oh-oh-obamania dept.

alphadogg writes "Barack Obama's election to US president has already brought a string of firsts, and on Wednesday there came another. The official presidential portrait was shot on a digital camera for the first time. The picture was taken by the White House's new official photographer, Pete Souza, and issued by The Office of the President Elect through its Web site. It was taken on Tuesday evening at 5:38 p.m. using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, according to the metadata embedded in the image file."

Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel 195

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @03:56PM from the raise-plow-blade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."

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