Hulleye Comes By!

We may not all have pointy ears and sharp teeth, but Spanish scientists are convinced that inside every human lurks the best bat-power: echolocation, or navigating by sound. And they’re determined to show us all how to unlock it!

Juan Antonio Martínez and a team of researchers at the University of Alcalá de Henares taught a group of volunteers (and themselves) to make palate clicks similar to those used by dolphins — although at a much slower rate. The series of protocols they developed then called for subjects to learn to aim their own sounds, and then to recognize their echos to identify objects around them.

The scientists promise, though, that you don’t need to be blind (like famous echolocaters Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood) to awaken your latent echolocation skills. Martínez tells SINC:

Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you, and ithin another two weeks you can tell the difference between trees and a pavement.

In fact, the scientists who taught themselves echolocation can now detect far more than just the terrain ahead of them: they can identify bones and even objects hidden in a bag.
They hope that their techniques can be put to use in the future by firefighters, rescue workers, people lost in fog or those lost in bat-filled caves in West Virginia.

Ant colonies are often part of bigger “mega colonies” that share genetic traits and will not make war on each other. One colony got so big it now rivals the human population in its reach, covering most of the planet.

According to BBC News:

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the “Californian large”, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony. Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles . . . “The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society,” the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.

The real question is, do the ants have a plan?

ever wonder what the significance of any number can be. well now you don’t have to wonder anymore. at least up till 9999 anyway.

remember the idiot box post.

well here’s some more super art from the 80’s over at /film.

i love the daily batman and superman. going straight to my rss reader in opera.

all the deaths in the nakatomi building courtesy john mclane.

19-year-old Liu Guojiang fell in love with an older woman, a 29-year-old widow with children named Xu Chaoqin. They eloped and went to live in a cave high on a mountain near Chongqing, China to escape the scandal in their local village. To make the trip down the mountain easier for his bride, Liu began carving steps into the stone of the mountainside. Did I mention it was a high mountain? He carved 6,000 steps! Fifty years later, in 2001, their story came to light when the steps were discovered by explorers. They were still in love and still living in a cave with no electricity. Liu passed away in 2007, holding his wife’s hand. Their story was serialized in China and considered to be one of the best love stories of the year.

the pakistan cricket board has decided to remove shoaib akhtar from the 15 man squad for next month’s twenty 20 cricket championship for reasons best read yourself.

The PCB has withdrawn Shoaib Akhtar from the 15-man squad for next month’s World Twenty20, saying – in an unusually revealing statement – that he had been diagnosed with genital viral warts. Rao Iftikhar Anjum’s name has been sent to the ICC’s technical committee by the PCB as a replacement.

Shoaib’s participation had been in doubt after Intikhab Alam, Pakistan’s coach, said yesterday he hadn’t recovered sufficiently from a skin infection to play the three practice games the Pakistan squad is playing in Lahore.

“Shoaib Akhtar has been withdrawn from the World Twenty20 squad and Rao’s name has been sent to the ICC as a replacement,” a board spokesman said on Thursday.

The PCB’s unusually graphic press release said that a three-member medical panel appointed by the PCB had found that Shoaib was suffering from “genital viral warts and electrofulgration [a surgical procedure] was done on May 12, 2009.”

The panel added that “his wound though healing needs further care and treatment for another minimum ten days for the purpose of healing and to achieve skin cover. The Medical Board further recommended his re-assessment after 10 days.
.

the science fiction genre in books and film have long written and shown about the possibilities of time travel and the scenarios that may or may not come with them.  they have nonsensical theories about how you could go murder your parents and be your own grandparents (i’m looking at you heinlein), or you could alter photographs and erase memories a la back to the future, or go see what your future holds in store for you, then go back in time and alter it to favour yourself and then get stuck in infinite time loops and paradoxes.

or not.

discover magazine gets into the nitty gritty of the actual facts behind it all and gets into what actually would be possible if and when we were able to travel back and forth in time. i’ll highlight a couple of points below, click on through to the article to read the rest of the descriptions.

0. There are no paradoxes.

This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

1. Traveling into the future is easy.

We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.

2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.

3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space.

4. Things that travel together, age together.

5. Black holes are not time machines.

6. If something happened, it happened.

7. There is no meta-time.

8. You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built.

9. Unless you go to a parallel universe.

10. And even then, your old universe is still there.

so drug testing in sport is fairly common now and getting stricter and stricter as years go by. so what do you think happened when a drug tester showed up at the belgian bodybuilding competition in brussells. all 20 of the participants ran off instead of peeing in a cup. can you imagine these giant men running off scared to pee in a cup. no shit sherlock, they didn’t get to be their size just by eating their greens and having their meat.

highlarious i say.

i think abbas referenced him today and it’s the first thing that came to mind so i used it as a title. anyway.

don’t you hate it when you gotta go in the middle of a movie for a break and there’s no way to pause and the second you get up and leave you miss a crucial scene.

well have no fear as runpee is here.

How not to save Detroit: Chrysler is in dire straits and hoping that Fiat will save the company. Join Hoofy and Boo as they watch two turkeys combine in an ill-conceived effort to make an eagle.

Sean Gourley is a physicist who wanted to know more about the Iraq war. He wanted to understand the war via the data — data about attacks, deaths, types of weapons used, locations, and so on. So he and his team started using publicly available data to chart the war and its effects. His conclusions about the nature of war are powerful: there is order in war; there is mathematical predictability in the way fighting forces work. The patterns that underly the Iraq conflict look the same across many conflicts. But what’s most interesting: you can use math to gauge the effectiveness of strategies (like the famous Surge) and chart the nature of a war over time.

Discussed: charting number of attacks versus size of attack (number killed), the pattern of war across the world, an equation to predict the likelihood of an attack in a given country, “so what,” the organizational structure of groups carrying out attacks (as a mathematically consistent value), why insurgencies work, and most interestingly: did the Surge work?

If you’re interesting in statistics or war, have a look: