An Interesting Fact

The sweat glands on the palms of human hands are only triggered by nervousness.

Not by heat, or physical exertion or anything else.

So sweaty palms on someone are a very clear signal that there is something on their mind.

Putting a ridiculous amount of extra blankets on your bed in winter

Pro: It makes your bed really, REALLY warm, thus enveloping you in a cocoon of comfort and serenity.

Con: It makes your bed really, REALLY warm, thus making it REALLY difficult to get out of bed in the morning.

Something Interesting About Fish

Something to remember when fishing - if you land a fish that's undersized, or you're a catch-and-release fisher:

If a hook is deeply embedded, cut the line. Fish have strong digestive acids that will dissolve metal. Studies have shown fish released in this manner have a higher survival than fish which have the hooks torn from their throats or stomach.

Some Interesting Fingers

Hey, there's something wrong with that hand...

It has no thumb!

What's that you say? There's too many fingers? Oh yeah, well that too. That's probably from some form of polydactyly.

Well that's a little strange.

This is what Youtube presented me with when I tried to get a video the other day:

500 Internal Server Error


Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

Also, please include the following information in your error report:Dtc7IAKAtp6wFmmIjDs3aZvDB1PozjVVV1C3Nn0ZZVc7F8NCfygAfMAC_Hpi
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I appreciate it not for the long string of unintelligible letters and numbers, but for the comment about highly trained monkeys. I wonder how their tech support staff feel about being referred to in this way.

Actually, it was probably their idea.

Trees can be rebels too

Stickin' it to the man, yo. Well, to the humans at least. Steel means nothing to to the inexorable expansion of the lateral meristem! This photo doesn't show the whole tree, so you can't see that it's a cabbage tree. It's one of a few of them growing in these cage things on Wakefield street, but it's the only one making an escape attempt.

You Don't Mess With The Orca

As a recreational writer with the occasional journalistic tendency (that is, I blog every now and then), I am often bothered by the way news is reported, whether in written form or on the six o'clock bulletin. In my opinion, the two biggest errors in journalism are over-sensationalisation of stories, and misleading headlines. Especially when the two are combined, usually with scientifically inaccurate statements and illogical assumptiosn from misunderstood statistical data. That's what really irks me. But anyway. I found an example of this on Thursday in the following article:

Whale makes meal of orca and calf

When I saw that headline, I was quite surprised. The accepted models of cetacean behaviour usually dictate that orca (Orcinus orca) prey on whales, not the other way around. The term "killer whale" for orca actually came from the name "whale killer", which arose from the fact that they... kill whales.  Groups of orca can take down blue whales, the world's largest animals, by working as a team and ripping out their tongues. There's not a lot that can stand up to an orca. Seals, sharks and dolphins are all fair game for them.

So I wondered what sort of whale would "make a meal" of an orca. I clicked the link to find out and was dissapointed by the opening sentence/paragraph:

"A boatload of tourists got to witness nature at its most brutal when a killer whale flicked a pseudo orca high into the air, broke its back and ate both it and its calf in the Bay of Islands yesterday."

Now, that headline said that a whale killed an orca.

No it didn't!

An orca killed a whale!

That's an important distinction!

Pseudo orca (Pseudorca crassidens, or false killer whales) are fairly average-looking porpoise-like critters, smaller than orca but bigger than dolphins. Sort of black in colour. Like real orca, they're members of the dolphin family (Delphinidae). No matter what you define a "whale" as, orca and pseudo orca have the same degree of whaleness. You can't refer to pseudo orca as "orca" if there are real orca in the same situation! That's like telling a story about a sea lion being attacked by a real lion, and saying that "a cat attacked a lion. Although lions are cats, sea lions are not lions, and pseudo orca are not orca.

The moral of the story is that I really, really dislike inaccurate, misleading or ambiguous reporting of facts. Not just in journalism. People do it all the time. My request to those of you that do: stop it.

There's one more lesson to be taken away from this though, and that is that orca (Orcinus orca) are quite good at killing stuff. Don't try to pick a fight with one.