Anatidaephobia is the fear that a duck is watching you. The term was coined by Gary Larson, author of the comic The Far Side, who profited from ducks watching people. In these days of contextual advertising, the fear may be well-founded. Link to larger screenshot. Link to text article. -via Bits and Pieces

In the Yamal penninsula of Siberia, resources are few, but the nomadic Nenets tribes survive by using the one resource as tough as they are: reindeer.

Their main occupation is reindeer breeding and all they have are reindeer, because they build houses of reindeer skin and make their clothes of it. There are a few thousand of herdsmen on the peninsula who have more than 500,000 reindeer. But presently their traditional occupation is at stake owing to global warming and climate change.

See a collection of pictures of the Nenets people at English Russia. Link -via Mothertrip

The staff at the Great Yarmouth Sea Life Centre in Norfolk, England learned their lesson last year, when farting turtles set off overflow alarms at another aquarium. The turtles get a Christmas treat of Brussels sprouts, which cause gas in turtles as they do in humans. When feeding sprouts to the turtles this year, the Norfolk aquarium lowered the water level to keep the expected bubbles from splashing water and setting off sensors.

Now the Yarmouth turtle tank -12 feet in depth and width holding 250,000 litres of water along with George the 3ft long green turtle - has been partially emptied for the festive season.

Thousands of litres have been removed to lower the water by a six inches and keep the sensitive alarms clear.

Displays Supervisor Christine Pitcher said: ''Last time an aquariist had to dash to the centre in the middle of the night, so we're not going to take any chances.

''Sprouts are really healthy for green turtles.

''The high levels of calcium in them are great for their shells, the fibre is good for their digestion and they also contain lots of beneficial Vitamin C, sulphur and potassium.''

Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Flickr user pkingDesign)

You don't have to be actually driving a car to be arrested for drunk driving. People have been arrested while operating a horse-and-buggy, a golf cart, or even a couch.

In perhaps the most absurd DUI case ever recorded, Dennis LeRoy Anderson, a 62 year old Minnesota couch potato with far too much time on his hands, was charged with DUI after crashing his motorized La-Z-Boy couch into a parked car. On October 22nd, 2009, Anderson swigged down far too many beers before taking his hot rod couch out for a spin around town. The couch, which was powered by a lawn mower engine, came strapped with a music-pumping boom box, a living room lamp, and cup holders to store his beer while steering.

Link -via Gorilla Mask

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Giant salamanders can grow up to five feet long! Flood control programs in Japan are threatening their spawning grounds, so scientists have developed innovative ways to help the salamanders get upstream. -via Unique Daily

Anyone with a remote car lock has wondered at one time or another whether the signal is really one-of-a-kind. What are the chances that your keyless entry could unlock someone else's car? It turns out the odds are pretty slim.

Modern remote keyless entry systems are pretty secure, but there is a slight chance Jason could open another Camry if he wants to walk up to one and press the unlock button on his remote (assuming it uses a 40-bit code) one trillion, ninety-nine billion, five hundred eleven million, six hundred twenty-seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six times, running through all the possible codes his remote could transmit until one works (assuming he can hit the button once every second without taking any breaks, he’ll need just shy of 34,842 years to do so).

Mental_floss explains how the coded radio signals work on a keyless entry and why the odds of unlocking another car are so small. Link

Remember how envious you were of the lucky person who got the best job in the world? Ben Southall, who beat 35,000 job applicants to live in a luxury island home in Australia and blog about the Great Barrier Reef was stung this week by an Irukandji jellyfish.

Australia is well-known for its myriad deadly creatures, but the peanut-sized Irukandji remains rather mysterious. It is virtually impossible to see and is tiny enough to pass through nets meant to keep jellyfish away from popular swimming spots.

Its sting can lead to symptoms including shooting pains in the muscles and chest, vomiting, restlessness and anxiety. Some symptoms can last for more than a week, and the syndrome can occasionally lead to a rapid rise in blood pressure and heart failure.

In 2002, two tourists were killed in separate incidents after being stung by the tiny creatures off northeast Australia — the first recorded Irukandji fatalities.

Southall was taken to a hospital where he spent the night, but has recovered enough to enjoy the final week of his six month assignment. Link -via Buzzfeed

Socks for your chairs? Yes, and they make your chair look like any of several stereotypes based on the style of socks. Get them in argyle (male or female colors), sporty, or striped. Your chairs will never get cold feet again! Link -via J-Walk Blog

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Starbucks launched their campaign against AIDS in Africa by putting together singers from 156 countries in one video performing The Beatles' song All You Need is Love. http://www.starbucksloveproject.com/ -via Buzzfeed

This article about rabies surprised me a little.

See, we know how to prevent rabies, but we have absolutely no idea how to cure it. In fact, we don't even really know how it kills people. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) its status as one of the first viruses to be tamed by a vaccine, rabies remains a little-understood disease.

What about all those stories you hear of someone being bitten by a rabid animal and having to get painful shots? I thought that was the cure, but it turns out those shots are actually a vaccine after the fact.

"You think about flu, that's a very quick virus. You develop symptoms in a couple of days. In a week, it's passed. But rabies incubation is very long," said Zhen Fu, DVM Ph.D., professor of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. "It may be weeks or even months before you develop an active infection. So we have enough time after a bite to immunize with normal vaccine and bring up the immune system."

New treatments for vaccine show promise, but with few cases to study, the results are not conclusive. Maggie Koerth-Baker researched the disease after she found a bat in her living room. Link

Weaving glass? It seems impossible until you think of it backwards from the finished product. In this piece, the glass warp is formed in the finished shape before it is woven to the weft. Here you'll find instructions for doing it yourself. http://www.weavezine.com/content/how-weave-glass -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

This post gives you a crash course in gravity, specifically how gravity affects the way we travel to (or don't travel to) other planets.

The more massive and more compact your planet is, the harder it is to get off of. Something like the Moon, which is only about 1.2% of the mass of the Earth but 27% of the Earth's radius, is way, way easier to escape from than the Earth. To escape from the Earth's gravity, you need to reach a speed of 40,000 km/hr (25,000 mph) from the Earth's surface. To escape from the Moon, on the other hand, you only need to reach 8,600 km/hr (5,400 mph).

This explains why it would be so much easier to travel to one of the moons of Mars than to Mars itself, due to the ease of traveling back home from those places. Link

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Jib Jab's annual year in review animation set to the tune of The Entertainer.

This may look like a snake attack, but it's actually an ad on a bus inviting everyone to the Copenhagen Zoo. Link -via J-Walk Blog

You can find a serious look back at the news of 2009 just about anywhere. A lot of those stories can be downright depressing. Meanwhile, Dave Barry reminds you of what happened while putting his ridiculous spin on 2009.

Elsewhere in politics, a team of specially trained wildlife agents equipped with nets and tranquilizer darts manages, after a six-hour struggle, to remove Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office. He is transported to an undisclosed swamp, where he is released into the wild and quickly bonds with the native ferret population.

On a more upbeat note, the nation finds a new hero in US Airways Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, who, in an astonishing feat of aviation, manages to land a US Airways flight safely in the Hudson River after it loses power shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia. Incredibly, all 155 people on board survive, although they are immediately taken hostage by Somali pirates.

In entertainment news, an unemployed California mother of six uses in-vitro fertilization to give birth to eight more children, an achievement that immediately catapults her to a celebrity status equivalent to that of a minor Kardashian sister.

And that's just January. The year ends with Somali pirates hiking the Appalachian Trail to escape North Korean missiles. Or something like that. http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/dave-barry/v-print/story/1397654.html -via Fark