Tool use in crocodylians: crocodiles and alligators use sticks as lures to attract waterbirds | Tetrapod Zoology, Scientific American Blog Network “As described by Dinets et al. (2013), Mugger crocodiles Crocodylus palustris in India and American alligators Alligator mississippiensis in the USA have both been observed to lie, partially submerged, beneath egret and heron colonies with sticks balanced across their snouts. Birds approach to collect the sticks for use in nest building and… well, let’s just say that it doesn’t end well for the birds. If the crocodylians really are using the sticks as bait to attract their bird prey, this is tool use, since the sticks are objects that are being employed for a specific function.” tags: animal crocodile tools tool science adaptation weekly How meaning comes to technology: PCR at 30 | Jean-Baptiste Gouyon | Science | theguardian.com “More than a technique, PCR is a concept, that enables molecular biologists to think in new ways of their object of study, DNA, to ask genes new questions. Opening the way to new experiments, it literally frees the imagination. Some even use PCR machines as fridges. After all a thermocycler is nothing but an intelligent heating and cooling block. It can be set on 4ºC for 48 hours, to conserve the result of an experiment over the week-end. ” How meaning […]

When we say “lifetime” . . . “First off, it’s important to understand that when we offered ‘lifetime’ support for a product; this referred to the lifetime of the product. As you’ve seen previously, we’ve retired products. That’s because these products, at some stage, become no longer viable or sustainable, and we can’t justify spending time on improving that product.” tags: weekly promises words woo Determine your eligibility – What you need to visit Canada as a tourist “The following travel documents are not considered reliable. You cannot use them to enter Canada: passports supposedly issued by Somalia,” tags: weekly Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit: China’s laws have encouraged the hit to kill phenomenon. “Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on […]

MCAFEE: I’ll decrypt San Bernardino phone free – Business Insider “Cyberscience is not just something you can learn. It is an innate talent. The Juilliard School of Music cannot create a Mozart. A Mozart or a Bach, much like our modern hacking community, is genetically created. A room full of Stanford computer science graduates cannot compete with a true hacker without even a high-school education.” tags: weekly education innate Building Concentric Circles with Nice Color Palettes For Fun and Science – The Media Temple Blog one of those pretty explorations across a variety of webdev/design/thoughtvector-ish fields tags: circles color webdev design weekly Try WorkFlowy Instantly slick tag based sorting features which open up some interesting options tags: tool todo list workflow weekly A Mathematician’s Lament ““Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural,satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!”h/t thinkthankthunk tags: education math music programming weekly Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor, reviewed. “As a sort of control, a colleague of Goodman’s experimented with showering every day while wearing the same clothes, unwashed, for several months, and “the smell was overpowering.” Therefore, Goodman concludes, “the 16th-century belief […]