Walter Fredrick Morrison

Walter Fredrick Morrison died on Feb 13, 2010.  You probably don’t know who he was, but it’s a pretty safe bet, he touched your life.

You can read more about him here.

Technorati Tags: frisbee, RIP, sports, Walter Fredrick Morrison, Wham-o

These kids attend Hope Christian School in the Milwaukee area and the video was made as a part of their Hope Idol contest.

Tell me it ain’t so, Joe! Any good lawyer will tell you to always read the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) before installing a new piece of software.  It’s for your own good.  For instance here’s the EULA for the Photoshop Action Pack by Ben Long:

You can use these actions for anything you like, and you can give them to your friends and co-workers (or even your enemies, if your experience of the actions leads you to believe that that’s where the real worth of this software lies). However, if you give them to someone else, you must give them the whole package including the installer, documentation, sample workflows, and a kiss on the cheek. You must then stand on one foot and cluck like a chicken. (Man, I can see why people want to be lawyers. Once you’ve got someone under your licensing power, you can make them do anything. But I digress…)

Failure to comply with this license will result in absolutely no consequences of any kind, as far as I know of. I’m mostly just writing this because the Apple Package Maker (the program used to create these installers) had this big blank spot where the license agreement goes, and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it, so I thought I’d just fill it instead. Besides, I was so distracted earlier by finishing the Filter By File Type action, that I forgot to go put the laundry in the dryer, so now I have to wait for it to finish so I can make the bed and go to sleep. I guess if I was actually a lawyer, I could hire or coerce someone into doing that for me.

Hat tip to Biephemera.

A kayaker/fisherman gets his comeuppance.

Thanks to Shannyn Moore for resurrecting this clip!

Sarah Palin letting you know she's eminently qualified for whatever.

What the heck happened to Sarah Palin?  Yesterday, July 3rd she resigned as governor, surprising everyone, including even those closest to her.Her resignation speech was a rambling incoherent mess explaining neither why she’s quitting nor what her vision of her future is.  She seems to have just thrown up her arms and given up.

This has precipitated much speculation.One of the most popular rumours up here is that she is resigning ahead of a federal indictment.  Maybe, maybe not.  I don’t think it really matters.

What we do know is that Palin is not at all happy with the media.  She feels she has been unfairly singled out, harrassed and maligned, attacked at every turn.  Um, well, it sure probably feels that way.  But the problem’s not the media. The problem is Sarah.  The media is not singling her out any more than any other politician.  The difference is, most politicians have learned to speak carefully, not exaggerate with easily checked facts and figures and know when not to argue or not to respond. Politically, Sarah Palin is a rube who was launched into the national arena years before she was ready.  I think being told she’s a charismatic personality who has ‘captured the heart and soul’ of the Republican Party has given her a huge ego problem.  But that ego is very fragile.  She can’t stand criticism or trash talk about herself.  She has to jump right in and respond.  The media follows. A joke in bad taste by David Letterman would have been forgotten the next day had Sarah kept her mouth shut. Levi Johnston would have had his 15 minutes of fame and disappeared but instead we got weeks of trailer trashing because Sarah had to respond.  The whole Alaska Independent Party thing would never had been an issue if she had just let it be. And on and on.

The latest blunder? She had a lawyer draw up a letter threatening to take action against bloggers repeating the rumor of an upcoming Federal indictment.  Then she promoted it all over the Internet.  Now it’s hit mainstream media.  If the rumours are false, they will just die away.  But not now.

My own personal opinion is that Sarah Palin is simply just aplain ol’  hockey mom. PTA and city council.  With a big but very fragile ego. Everything’s personal. All of these petty and not so petty squabbles have taken their toll.  She’s died of a thousand cuts as they say. I think we have been watching the agonizing slow motion self destruction of someone totally out of their depth. I suspect that lately there have been a few late night tears. But probably no lessons learned. Sad, really.

US start up Ambient Corporation has a neckband able to pick up the nerve signals the brain sends to the muscles in the voicebox and have a computer decode them. They realised that those signals are sent even when a person thinks about speaking without actually making a sound. As a result, a person wearing the neckband can think a phrase and have the computer recognise it. The video below shows it in action.

Short Sharp Science has the story.

Well, first you have to train them to crawl through a tube…

Read more at the Marine Mammal Trainers Blog

Found in email:

“Dear Red States:

We’re ticked off at the way you’ve treated California, and we’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and the entire Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss.

We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home.

We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of America’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sisters schools, plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you. Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re
discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

By the way, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Sincerely,
Author Unknown in New California.”

From Northern Canada, TruckerMcD writes:

This is a raven that lives near the Ekati mine at the end of the Ice Road. I swear he knows me by sight. If I’m in a group of trucks, he will single me out and fly beside me. This was one of the best experiences of my whole trip.

The year was 1912, Shizo Kanakuri was running for Japan’s very first Olympic team at the Stockholm games. During the race, Shizo dropped out from heat exhaustion and spent the next hour in a nearby garden enjoying refreshments and visiting wih the owners. Embarrassed, he never completed the race and disappeared back to Japan. In 1966, Swedish television tracked him down in Japan and invited him to return and complete his marathon. Shizo graciously accepted, and 54 years after his first Olympics, he went to the garden where he had previously quit the race and finally finished the marathon.

In the years between starting and completing the race Shizo Kanakuri had managed to get married, sire six children and 10 grandchildren. He died in 1984, the proud holder of a record unlikely ever to be broken.

If this is the kind of thing you need to keep up with, then knock yourself out.
Here’s the link.

If this doesn’t put a smile on your face, you’re hopeless.

A story from Not Exctly Rocket Science describes the discovery that mosquitoes not only hear (it was assumed that they didn’t) but that they also harmonize in mating love songs with their wing beats:

To our ears, the buzz of a mosquito is intensely irritating and a sign of itchiness to come, but to theirs, it’s a lover’s serenade. The high-pitched drone of a female is a siren’s song that attracts male mosquitoes. And a new study shows that when the two love-bugs meet, they perform a duet, matching each other’s buzzing frequency with careful precision.

The female Aedes aegypti mosquito (the carrier of both dengue and yellow fever) beats her wings with a fundamental frequency of about 400Hz, producing a pitch just slightly lower than concert A. Males on the other hand, have a fundamental frequency of around 600Hz, about one D above middle C.

Lauren Cator and colleagues from Cornell University discovered the sonic secrets of courting mosquitoes by tethering individuals to pins and moving the females past the males. On two-thirds of these fly-bys, the amorous mosquitoes harmonised. Neither took the lead - instead, both buzzers shifted their flight tones so that the male’s second harmonic (the second multiple of his fundamental frequency) and the female’s third had a mutual frequency of about 1,200 Hz. They synchronised in this way for about 10 seconds.

Lacking ears like ours, mosquitoes hear with their antennae and structures called Johnston’s organs. But for decades, the wisdom of textbooks has said that males are deaf to any frequency over 800Hz and females are completely deaf. Cator disproved that by using miniature electrodes to show that the Johnston’s organs of both sexes produced electrical signals in response to frequencies as high as 2000 Hz.

The duets depended on one partner hearing the other. If they were deafened by removing their antennae, or by gluing the antennae to the Johnston’s organs, nothing happened. But seeing another mosquito wasn’t necessary - individuals were all too happy to match the frequency of an electronically produced tone, even one that is set below or above the insect’s natural flight tone.

Cator suggests that a male mosquito’s ability to match the tone of his partner is the result of sexual selection. Perhaps females can judge the best mates by selecting those who can match their frequencies with the greatest skill. That will need to be tested in future studies but for now, one thing is clear - falling for one song makes the female less likely to fall for another.

Cator found virgin females were about three times more likely to match an electronic tone than those who had already mated. That backs up other research which suggests that Aedes aegypti females aren’t keen to mate again for a fair while after they’ve done it once. Cator even suggests that releasing sterile males could be a way of controlling mosquito populations in the wild - it would lead to fruitless matings that would prevent females from engaging in productive ones later.