See the opressed Cape Buffelo masses rise up as one to overthrow the lion aristocracy after suffering one outrage too many! Long, but worth watching all the way through. Somewhat inane commentary courtesy of South African tourists.
Natural World
I For One Welcome Our New Sylvan Overlords
It’s in the trees! it’s coming!
From the Flickr gallery “treepower – trees eating things’. here’s nature making a mockery of our puny human ideas of permanence:
Look closely, the tree’s trunk actually surrounds both wire chain links and the horizontal support pole.
600 block of Rodman Street, Philadelphia
And it’s not just Philadelphia… more trees eating things:
Villagers are calling for a preservation order to be issued to protect a tree that has enveloped pieces of metal, including a bicycle, a ship’s anchor and chain, and a bridle bit.
The sycamore tree, dating from the 1800s, stands in the yard of an old smithy in Brig o’Turk, in the Trossachs, now part of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs national park. As it grew, the expanding trunk engulfed the blacksmith’s scrap heap around it.
Don’t look now but the trees are taking over.
Oh, Snap!
Sometimes the jokes just write themselves
Adjacent Raw Story headlines:
It’s no weirder than all the speculation (oh, all right then, it’s me speculating, but if I just sneakily use the wingnut blogger construction ‘some say’, my ass is covered) that the Cheney sprog’s a clone of his own grandad, like in The Boys From Brazil; he’s just the first in a strain of uber-Cheneys being bred to take over the world and he’ll be called Damien and have a big pet dog and a very loyal nanny.
Maybe a shark would be better.
The Philosophy Of Fruit Flies: Do We Really Have Free Will?
Maybe not, given the implications of the discovery that insects have decision-making capability:
Fruit flies display rudimentary free will
01:00 16 May 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Bob HolmesFruit flies have free will. Even when deprived of any sensory input to react to, the zigs and zags of their flight reveal an intrinsic, non-random – yet still unpredictable – decision-making capacity.
If evolution has furnished humans with a similar capacity, this could help resolve one of the long-standing puzzles of philosophy.
Science assumes that effects have causes, and that if we understand the causes well enough we can predict the effects. But if so, our experience of being free to make choices is an illusion, since we are in effect just sophisticated robots responding to stimuli. If our behaviour is unpredictable, this is only because random events prevent us from responding perfectly to our environment.
All the media is reporting that this means flies have free will.
The experimenters glued a bunch of fruit flies to something and then analysed their subsequent attenmpts at movement into random and non-random, which if I’m understanding this correctly, showed that what looked like free will arose from a reiteration of random movements forming a chaotic system. So it only appears to be free will.
“It makes a lot of sense to assume that what we experience as free will is based on components that have cropped up in evolution long before”
The whole universe is looking like it’s a series of reiterated random events that have formed a chaotic system – and we’re part of that, just like fruitflies, so why should we be any different?
This Is Not Good News
I can face any amount of scary things but not spiders. Yet I’m always the one they go for. I once cowered for around 8 hours on a steamy hot night in the US, desperate for the loo and clenching mightily, because a huge spider was between me and the salvation of my bladder. Eventually I shot it with an air-rifle. I blame spiders for fucking up my kidneys, the evil little bastards. So I really didn’t need to see this story:
Biting spider widens its web
A British spider which can bite humans is on the move.
Until recently, Steatoda Nobilis, a close relative of the notorious Black Widow, was native to Dorset.
But it can now be found in parts of Devon, Cornwall and Essex.
Steatoda Nobilis is believed to be the only one of Britain’s 640 spider species which bites humans.
It is reported to have bitten at least 10 people in Dorset and four in Devon.
Argh. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had huge wolf or rafter spiders on my pillow, in my sheets, running up my leg in bed…urgh, *shudder*. I’m sure it’s pheromonal.
When accused of irrational arachnophobia I retort that it’s not irrational at all, because I do find them absolutely fascinating. I had no issues with them as a child either – in my family they were known affectionately as ‘graggies’. Nope, my arachnaphobia isn’t irrational at all, it’s a learned response and perfectly rational. The buggers attacked me first.