Ban, a two-year old dog from Japan, survived three weeks at sea on a rooftop after the recent earthquake and tsunami. He was rescued from the Japanese Coast Guard and, as you can see in this video, reunited with his owner:
The 2-year-old dog, named Ban, greeted her owner "with joy, jumping and wagging her tail."
''We'll never let go of her,'' the owner was quoted as saying by a center official, according to Kyodo News, which portrays the reunion as more subdued, writing that the dog "happily wagged her tail when the owner appeared."
We don't have flying cars, but otherwise, it can be hard for science fiction to keep up with the pace of modern technology. Evan Hoovler of blastr has a list of eight technological wonders from science fiction now present in real life, such as the PADD from Star Trek, now available as the iPad:
Like modern electronics, the P.A.D.D. had its own development throughout the series. The 24th-century model was almost solely used by touching a screen. Not bad, but we're sure the Enterprise captains would've probably liked some Freecell while drifting through empty space. How about one of millions of books? The iPad incorporates modern technology into this classic sci-fi design, moving us one step closer to achieving the ultimate dream (holodeck).
Forget Jaws! The real danger is far closer to home: statistics reveal that more Americans are killed each year by something far more dangerous .... the cow.
The next time you're nervously scanning the surface of the sea for a dorsal fin, remember one thing: Statistically speaking, you are much more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark.
Between 2003 and 2008, 108 people died from cattle-induced injuries across the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's 27 times the whopping four people killed in shark attacks in the United States during the same time period, according to the International Shark Attack File. Nearly all those cow-related fatalities were caused by blunt force trauma to the head or chest; a third of the victims were working in enclosed spaces with cattle.
While the ongoing battle between cow and man is overwhelmingly one-sided (and delicious), the people who work closely with cattle take major risks. "I've been kicked, I've been pushed, I've been charged," says 22-year-old Margaret Dunn, a graduate research assistant studying animal science at Iowa State University. "Like what they say about dogs, they can smell fear."
The geoid is the surface of an ideal global ocean in the absence of tides and currents, shaped only by gravity. It is a crucial reference for measuring ocean circulation, sea-level change and ice dynamics – all affected by climate change.
I'm sure we all have heard the idiom "like a kid in a candy store" - but has anyone ever conducted an actual experiment with kids in a candy store? Like, for instance, does music played in the store have any role in keeping them in the store longer?
Well, scientists from Université de Bretagne-Sud in France have. They discovered that you indeed can keep 'em in the store longer by playing cartoon music as opposed to Top Forty songs (though apparently, there's no change in the amount of money spent, presumably because moms aren't affected by those type of aural shenanigans). Via Discoblog.
If you think that CAPTCHA, the squiggly lines you have to decipher in order to login or place your comments on many websites, are only there to keep out spammers, think again!
There is actually another use of the annoying feature: to correct mistakes in scanning old text. Guy Gugliotta of the New York Times explains:
For vintage 19th-century texts in English, O.C.R. programs mess up or miss 10 percent to 30 percent of the words. Only humans can fix the errors. The standard method, called key and verify, uses two transcribers to type the text independently and compares the results. This is time-consuming and extremely expensive.
But in 2006, Dr. von Ahn’s team figured out a way around this obstacle. The ubiquitous Captchas, familiar to even the most casual Web user, were the perfect tools. Captchas, short for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart,” are impossible for machines to decipher, but easy for humans. (The test is named for the British computer pioneer Alan Turing.)
Dr. von Ahn’s group estimated that humans around the world decode at least 200 million Captchas per day, at 10 seconds per Captcha. This works out to about 500,000 hours per day — a lot of applied brainpower being spent on what Dr. von Ahn regards as a fundamentally mindless exercise.
“So we asked, ‘Can we do something useful with this time?’ ” Dr. von Ahn recalled in a telephone interview. Instead of making Captchas out of random words printed in a woozy way, why not ask Web users to translate problem words from archival texts?
You didn't really believe that Arnold Schwarzeneggar was going to retire after he left the governor's office, did you? This concept may be both a TV show and a movie, as well as a comic book. Link -via Buzzfeed
Is there something about a cute bunny rabbit that brings out the perverse side of toy designers? You'd think so by looking at these! The bunnies on this list are scary, bloody, or dead, and may be disturbing to some readers. To be fair, they are marketed to adults. Shown here are the Killer Bunny Slippers of Caerbannog, the most innocuous image of the lot. Link
Paleontologist Josep Quintana Cardona of the Mediterranean island of Minorca and colleagues have discovered the fossils of the largest rabbit that ever lived on Earth:
The new hunk of a rabbit, now named Nuralagus rex, shows the kind of unusual turn that evolution can take on islands. “Gigantism happens,” explains Brian Kraatz of Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif. When pioneer animals start colonizing an island, rates of evolution typically speed up at first, he explains. Small creatures can supersize, and big ones can shrink. [...]
So far no plausible rabbit-eaters have turned up among fossils from the same stretch of time on Minorca, so the big bunnies could have evolved larger and larger body size without pressure to maintain speed and agility to escape predators. The relatively short, stiff spine of the fossils suggests that Nuralagus didn’t hop much, if at all, say Quintana Cardona and colleagues. They describe its pace as “low-gear walking.” [...]
What the rabbit king of Minorca did have were paws adapted for digging, a help in finding food to sustain its regal size. So far, though, there’s no sign of giant carrots.
Mother's Day is almost here! Are you looking for a fun and practical Mother's Day gift for your favorite Mom? Check out the delectable Cupcake Apron from the NeatoShop. It's sweet and sassy just like Mom.
Mental_floss is celebrating the migration of the site to a new, malware-free, high security server! And that means the return of Lunchtime Quizzes. Today's quiz features questions from the game Who Said What in the White House, in order to test your presidential prowess. Identify eleven quotes and pat yourself on the back if you beat my score of 45% (which is about average). Link
In 1976, three young men kidnapped a school bus full of children in Chowchillla, California. The 26 children and the driver were forced at gunpoint into a truck that was buried at a rock quarry. The bus driver, Ed Ray, and some of the older boys dug back through the hole through which they entered the underground chamber. It took them 16 hours to escape. Meanwhile, the kidnappers planned to demand $5 million in ransom, but the police phone lines were busy. Before the plan could be carried out, the victims had escaped. Richard Schoenfeld, James Schoenfeld, and Fred Woods received life sentences for the crime. They have served 35 years in prison. Some people believe that's enough, including their prosecutor David Minier.
Since then, each has been denied parole dozens of times. Supporters say their continued imprisonment makes a mockery of the idea of rehabilitation. Minier, now a retired judge, favors parole for all three kidnappers.
"Quite frankly, I am simply amazed that Richard Schoenfeld, given his record as a model prisoner, was not paroled years ago," Minier wrote the parole board in 2006.
At the Feb. 23 news conference in San Francisco, Dale Fore, one of the lead investigators in the case, said: "They were just dumb rich kids, and they paid a hell of a price for what they did."
After retiring from the Madera County Sheriff's Department, Fore worked as a private investigator for the Woods family's attorneys, tracking down kidnapping victims to see if any would write letters of support for parole. None has.
"I might not be the most popular guy when I get back home," Fore said. "But right is right. How much time do you want out of these guys?"
If you ask the people of Chowchilla, the answer is life without parole. On one hand, the crime as planned was horrific. On the other hand, no one was seriously hurt in the end. Many people convicted of murder receive lighter sentences. On the other hand, this crime could have ended as a mass murder. What do you think? Link -via Metafilter
Can you distinguish which man in this picture is Czar Nicholas II of Russia, and which is King George V of England? The two monarchs were cousins born only three years apart. Can't decide? George is on the right. -via TYWKIWDBI
New York University has advice for international students in dealing with US Americans. A handy guide is posted on their website.
Americans generally believe the ideal person is self-reliant. Most Americans see themselves as separate individuals, not as representatives of a family, community or other group. They dislike being dependent on other people, or having others depend on them. Some people define this trait as selfishness. Others see it as a healthy freedom from the constraints of family or social class.
How is this value manifested into behavior? In individualist cultures, such as the U.S., it is assumed that people need to be alone some of the time and prefer to take care of problems by themselves. Another expectation is that people are ready to "do business" very soon after meeting, without much time spent on preliminary conversation. Also people act competitively, are proud of their accomplishments and expect others to be proud of their own accomplishments.
Reading this makes the USA seem like a strange, exotic culture. Which I suppose it is if you weren't born and raised here. Link -via Breakfast Links
Photographer Horace Warner took hundreds of pictures of street urchins in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields in 1912. At the time, it was one of London's harshest slum areas, but has been gentrified in the past few decades. These photographs are a peek into the world that inspired Charles Dickens.
Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They make look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.
