Definitely fake. I think bales of hay are compressed pretty firmly, and he would likely be dead. Besides, how do you take a bunch of hay and make it into a brick? You need to squeeze it firmly with pressure plates on all six sides. To get those flat sides you need to apply a lot of pressure, and yet he comes out with head, arms and legs protruding from the bale, with no blood showing.

Alejo

Livy's alternate history seems rather self-serving. It is full of boasts about how brave, resilient, and well-armed the Romans were, and hence how they could have easily bested Alexander's army. Livy's work reads like pro-Roman propaganda.

When Roman legions finally subdued the Greek armies, it wasn't a walk in the park. Would they have fared better against a dynamic general like Alexander.

Disclosure: my name's Alexander, so I'm hardly unbiased myself.

Alejo

Christianity's key events occur in historical time. The gospels refer to an actual Judean king and real Roman emperors. This is different from many world religions, in which the key events occur in "illo tempore" (the other time). For example, Cain slew Abel in a time that is not in a calendar, not historical time.

That's why people keep looking for actual historical artifacts from the time of Jesus. Humans are very literal-minded, and have trouble seeing religious events in their real sense: as myths. As myths, they remain powerful, but they are not part of our ordinary material world.

Alejo

At first I thought the picture of the nuthatch was photoshopped, because it looks like the photographer just flipped the picture of the bird. But it's real. Wow indeed.

Alejo

Unfortunately, when I grew up in Canada, I was taught Parisian French in high school. A fat lot of good that did me when I moved to Montreal.

They're 9 inches (about 20cm) long.

@Walter: You say that the USA's ethnic diversity is a cause of violence. What about your neighbors to the North? These days, a very large portion of Canada's population comes from other countries. And, guess what? Violence isn't rampant in Canada. So we can't blame it on diversity.

It's not guns either: more Canadians own guns, proportionately, than Americans, yet there is little gun violence in Canada. Go figure.

Maybe it's the free taxpayer-funded health care system. Among other things, it helps to tell the poor that there is some fairness in society, that the rich are contributing to the people's overall well-being.

Discontent and violence in the USA is mostly fueled by poor people's resentment and desperation. They know that they will never get to share in the "American Dream" (which in itself is about as real as gods in the heavens, but that's another matter).

Alejo

How about leaving out the condensed milk, sugar and macaroni? It would make an excellent low-carb salad.

Alejo

The real issue here is that our eyes and brains work to figure out the MATERIAL properties of what we see, not the exact red/green/blue numbers of the pixels (our eyes aren't simply photometers). The rgb values will change with lighting, and our brains are very good at overcoming such lighting effects and extracting the underlying material's color. When you cover the contrast edge with a pencil, your eyes perceive the different shades on either side as different levels of illumination, and your brain decides that the same material color is present on both sides.

@whitcwa: BTW, if you like the illusion you posted, there's a whole bunch of them at Michael Bach's site: (warning: your eyes will hurt)

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html

Alejo

You could have submitted this to the Darwin awards (people whose foolishness leads to their removal from the gene pool). But that wouldn't have been appropriate: this guy was clearly athletic, a good physical specimen from the darwinian point of view. I think what you see here is that people at the top of their physical ability are the biggest risk takers. The very thing that makes you attractive to the opposite sex is what can get you killed.

Alejo

This is a very sexist article. It focuses exclusively on women giving birth, and presents no statistics on men giving birth.

Alejo

I was not surprised to see Thorazine listed. However, there's still controversy over it. Does it simply mask the symptoms of schizophrenia, by reducing a person's over-all brain activity? Many patients have described taking the drug as similar to being hit by a baseball bat, in the sense that it feels oppressive, not curative.

Sure, we don't have crazy people walking around talking to themselves, but that just means we can't hear their quiet murmurs any more. They're still crazy.

Alejo

I'm not so sure that Fritz Haber (the Jew who invented a method for making ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen) thought that his invention was purely meant for making fertilizer. I think his main goal was to make a precursor for explosives. Due to the blockade, Germany had little access to nitrates needed to make explosives, so "fixing" nitrogen out of thin air was a big contribution to the war effort.

What is indeed ironic (or perhaps simply sad), however, is that he was a patriotic Jew trying to help his country in the war, and that sentiment in Germany turned so bitterly against Jews twenty years later.

Alejo

You guys are all missing the point. The interesting question is, how did that hair get into hyenna poop? Who was the unfortunate human victim?

A book that includes a really interesting chapter on apples is "The Botany of Desire," by Michael Pollan. It's well written, and a quick read.

One important fact is that apple seeds do not "spring true". In other words, if you plant a red "Delicious" apple, the resulting tree will almost certainly just bear sour-tasting crap apples. In fact, very few apple trees bear fruit that is sweet and edible. In other words, there is enormous genetic variability in apples.

There are several important consequences of this fact. One is that "Johnny Appleseed" (a real person) who planted apple seeds in the USA in the 1800s was probably NOT aiming to produce sweet fruits. His apple trees were probably meant to produce sour apples that could be fermented into alcoholic cider. No wonder he was so popular!

Another consequence is that, once a good apple tree is found that produces sweet fruits, the only way to get more of those fruits is to take cuttings from it and graft them onto ordinary apple tree root stock. In other words, all apple tree that produce a particular variety of edible apple (eg "Delicious") is a clone of the original.

Nature is an arms race, and insects develop ways of overcoming the natural defenses of plants. Plants, in turn, produce different offspring which may produce new chemical defenses. If all plants are genetic clones (as all commercial apple trees must be), they are not evolving any more, and begin to fall behind in the arms race. That's why HUGE quantities of pesticides are needed to get an apple tree to get past creatures that attack the bark, the blossoms, and the fruit.

When I was a child we had an apple orchard and never sprayed the trees with chemicals. In the spring, all the trees were covered with caterpillars, and in the fall the apples all had worms in them. You just had to cut away the bad bits.

Alejo