Kate’s Having a Party

Not quite a hump-day happy, but close enough.

I don’t know if it is the original event, but Kate’s party appears to be still on – are you going?

A deadly vengeance of deadly revenge most deadly and vengeful

I played a game of Dr. Who Mao* the other week and was lost by all these references to damnfangled new doctors and catchphrases (actually I was also stumped by a reference to obscure old tape episodes too). If only I had seen this video sooner:

Curse of Fatal Death Part Two (with lots of guest stars) HERE.

*If you don’t know the game Mao, I’ll explain later.

Time travellers caught on film

Look at the picture below. This is quite likely an actual unedited 1940s photograph of the reopening of a bridge in British Columbia.

Can you spot the alleged time traveler?

What are your immediate thoughts and explanations?

Full story and investigation at forgetomori. It probably is not a hoax. But it also probably is not time travel. And it is interesting nonetheless.

Interesting quote on the ‘why then and there’ skeptical thinking: “Of course, because we know nothing happened there right? But if we are considering time travel, how can we know if in some other timeline something historical happened right there?”

Sixth Sense: The world is your touchscreen

Here is the TED video I snuck in at the end of the previous post. It is just way too amazing to miss.Pranav Mistry from India explains the amazing potential of the “Sixth Sense” interactive media device. No psychics involved, I promise.

more about “Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potentia…“, posted with vodpod

A world without paper cuts

Reading with an iPod You're doing it wrong

It could well soon be the world we live in.

A world without electrical shocks and stomach burns may be another story for another day.

I will admit to a love/hate relationship with paper over the last 25 years. For the pursuit of drawings, doodles, story writing, schoolwork, reports, certificates, laboratory notes, my thesis, and, yes, I’ll even admit pen and paper roleplaying games, countless forests have been sacrificed , and in my shame I have been loathe to just throw them away. At my mother’s there still remains a suitcase filled with 3 years worth of undergraduate biomed notes and study guides that I have yet to throw away, because ‘I went to all that trouble’ and ‘maybe it will be of use one day’.

I blame my mother for not buying me a computer and exposing me to digital media. These days I have been making progress in keeping my teacher-in-the-making resources more digitally based (powerpoints, activity pdfs, and lists of links) – but I still have a growing colony of paper sheets that I have had to recently sanction a humanitarian cull of over the Easter weekend. The new heater screen and my ipod touch will try and keep my digital honour intact.

No, not Latin and Owls!

Friday night at the movies:

How do I know this is bullshit? She says Harry Potter was “beautiful written and extremely provocative”. Excuse me? One word. “Muggle,” just, “Muggle.” Whenever anyone tells HP is the bomb, I say this, “Muggle?”

I also think it is a wonder of self-contradiction that such adamant True Believers in the One and Only God, still think that their is power in the symbols and practices of Thor and Wicca.

HDH: Quolls pass training test

This weeks Hump Day Happy via DaveTheHappySinger

Cane toads were a bad idea. A very bad idea. An insanely bad idea. But anyway, Australia is now stuck with rampaging toxic amphibians threatening almost all our native wildlife. Amongst those threatened are native carnivores. Aside from birds and snakes, there is a whole range of little superficially rodent-looking marsupials, and quolls.

Quolls are awesome. Just from having an awesome name like “Quoll” (and providing more ‘q’ words in scrabble). They aren’t wimpy like “possums” and “sugar gliders”, these critters eat MEAT. Sadly, toads are made from meat, so quolls will naturally try to to eat toads. And then they die. Which is sad.

So the happy news at ABC is that scientists at University of Sydney have been successfully training small groups of quolls to resist the urge to eat cane toads using aversion therapy. The quolls were exposed to small toads sprayed with a nauseating compound which made trying to eat the delicious grenouilles quite unappealing.

“The toad was hopping around. It looked like something good to eat, but once they sniffed it they got that signal saying, ‘Hey, we’re not good to eat’ and they ignored it.” – Dr. Jonathan Webb

A video of the training process is also up on the ABC.

When released into the wild and monitored, trained quolls had higher survival rates than untrained quolls.

The scientists hope that toad training can be initiated ahead of the toad invasion front, so that by the time the toads reach that area the quolls (and other animals) no better than to try and eat one.

The actual scientific article can be found at the Journal of Applied Ecology (you’ll need a Wiley InterScience subscription) DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2010.01802.x

It’s Alive in Brisbane: Pretty Possum

Finally, I have been able to photograph something living in the Brisbane area that wasn’t a water dragon. I was getting worried they might have eaten everything else.

Actually, I have seen other living things, I just have not had my camera with me when I have seen them.

The rusty critter above was spotted at the QUT Kelvin Grove campus as I came home from the bus stop after ice skating. Possums are pretty common to be spotted on campus at night, and I have seen at least one during the day time.

Later on, closer to my unit, spotted one hanging upside down on a wire outside someone’s house. Thankfully they didn’t notice me taking flash photography outside their window, which may have been a little difficult to explain easily.

Did You Know: First Edition (?)

I can't believe it's not Canada

Have I done one of these before?

Some miscellaneous facts that I have uncovered across Wikipedia:

• The City of Canada Bay is not in Canada – it is a Local Government Area located in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia that was created in the year 2000.
• When a top secret 1950s military project file detailing a chicken-powered underground tactical nuclear weapon, “Blue Peacock“, was declassified by the British government on April 1, 2004, it was initially presumed to be an April Fool’s Day joke … it wasn’t.
• The name for Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, in the Mongolian language is öbör mongγol which could be transliterated at “breast mongolia“.
• Some plants in arid conditions use a specialised adpative metabolic pathway, Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) photosynthesis, that allows them to fix carbon dioxide at night, and leave their stomata closed during the day.
• NASA astronaut Edgar Dean Mitchell takes the prize for being the ultimate space cadet – although holding a doctorate in science and being the sixth man to walk on the moon, Mitchell is an avid believer in paranormal activity including psychic powers, UFOs and extraterrestrial life.

My current “Did You Know” factbox is on my public Wikispace.

Image credit: Canada Bay by Just For Fun – Jason on Flickr (CC A-NC)

Away and be gone

The big wide world of the future looms ever closer with every passing moment.

Every time some one reminds me that June, practicals, and then graduations are only “a few months away” I sense it.

Thankfully some stress can fade away this week, as I have finally gotten away my application to Education Queensland. Hopefully they will see it within in their graciousness to bequeath upon me some kind of position to tide me over until my sister’s wedding next year, and the money to reach Canada for it.

In the pre-service teacher careers seminar I attended the EQ representative did say that “early February” was a good time to submit applications to maximise the chance of mid-year appointment. Perhaps I am a little late. But, given this seminar occurred in late February, I am not sure quite what I was expected to do about that.

Happy Returns

Yes. Coming back at you like a thing that comes at you.

No excuses available. I just got lazy, bored, and otherwise pre-occupied with life. I was also sick of my laptop and getting money (or credit limit) to purchase an oversized heat screen (iMac i5) took almost as long as getting the damned thing delivered.

For those of you who are still hanging on from where I left you, below is the glory that resulted from last year’s moustache growing month was. In the end my team together raised just shy of $2.5K for men’s health.

This picture was created in GIMP (which I am having difficulty getting to run on Snow Leopard on my new iMac), with much thanks to my flatmate’s hat, gimp.org tutorial on creating sketch effects, and font Bleeding Cowboys.

This picture also highlights just how crooked my nose is. Shame.

Something smells fishy about this sushi

Click frame for complete comic at Ménage á 3 (NB: comics can be NSFW).

One of the activities that has seen me diverted from blogging duties has been a Japanese language group I joined last year.

Despite Brisbane and Queensland in general being a popular destination for Japanese in Australia, the Japanese students and visitors I’ve met complain it is hard to find authentic Japanese cuisine. With sushi bars approximately every 200 meters, it may seem difficult to believe. But even I notice that many of the city’s sushi bars are actually owned an/or staffed by Koreans (complete with Korean signs, Korean pop star posters, and Korean community papers and zines on display etc.).

Korean restauranteurs posing as Japanese is not anything entirely new or restricted to just Brisbane or Australia (Ménage is set in Montreal, and here is an article with the Japanese government wagging a finger at L.A.). Why does it happen?

I can’t find anything exactly investigating the phenomenon. I don’t think it is because old war issues, because they are as likely to be with Japanese as Koreans. And I don’t think it is because people don’t like Korean food, because, at least in Brisbane there are still plenty of of Korean restaurants around. Anyone know of another suggestion? Perhaps it is just that there are some Koreans who open Japanese restaurants.