Fact: Crocodiles Can't Chew



When I was a kid and Crocodile Dundee was popular (I predate Steve Irwin's fame by about a decade, apparently), I was terrified that I'd find myself in some isolated swamp full of crocodiles, and that those crocodiles would, of course, want to eat me. I was maybe too young to watch the movie. Anyway, it turns out my horrible nightmare about crocodiles politely chewing me up was not only improbable but also inaccurate: crocodiles can't even chew.
Yes, it’s true. Despite their fearsome reputation, crocodiles can’t chew. But that’s not to say they won’t kill you—in fact, death by crocodile is probably more agonizing precisely because they’re unable to masticate.

Great!  I feel way better about this. Get the details of crocodiles' etiquette-free eating habits on Mental_floss. Link

Image: MartinRe

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Copy pasted from around the net:

- Crocodile tears: crocodiles can't chew, so they are forced to rip their food into chunks and swallow them whole. As luck would have it, the glands that keep their eyes moist are right near their throats, so their eating habits actually force tears into their eyes.

- The muscles that close the jaw can exert literally tons of pressure, but muscles for opening the jaw are weak, and an alligator’s jaw can be held closed with a thick rubber band. This fact is skillfully exploited during most alligator wrestling shows.
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That's not a "factoid" that's a "fact". A factoid is something consider to be true because it appears in print.

Or maybe that's exactly what you meant.
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While many will tell you that it's unnecessary to kill background Apps in iOS (and that iOS should fluidly and effectively manage performance/memory use without any user intervention).... I've not found this to be true in every day usage.

The pattern I've noticed on my iPhone4/iPad2 (both have latest iOS5.1.1) is that over longer and longer lengths of time between rebooting AND heavier and heavier multitasking ( a wide range of memory intensive apps).. that the devices/iOS stability and performance seems to be impacted to a slightly noticeable degree.

I can show this by using an App like iStat to watch a variety of indicators (Uptime, memory usage, memory-paging, etc)

If I force-close individual Apps (or better yet, do a full shutdown/reboot of the device).. it instantly regains snappy performance. I've found the best strategy (for me) is to do full reboots of my devices about every 3 to 4 days.
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Well, the spears.org article is mostly right. However, I would assume the iPhone practices aggressive power management, which typically includes shutting down DRAM banks that aren't currently needed. So you can potentially save power if you flush enough apps from memory, but that's not quite the same thing as closing them from the task bar (which may include applications that were already flushed from memory).

And it certainly has little to do with them "running" in the background. That was Apple's complaint about giving apps free reign to do whatever they wanted, and why they implemented a rather restrictive model that leads to funny behavior occasionally.

The most important side effect closing apps in the task bar can have is speeding up load times for other applications you may open/reopen later, since you can avoid the flushing phase if there's already free memory available. That's the only reason I tend to manage my task bar; because I want better responsiveness on other apps after I close a memory hog.
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