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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Sunday, July 8, 2012

The Daily Drift

Einstein was cool.

Some of our readers today have been in:
Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia
Moscow, Russia
Alor Setar, Malaysia
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Sanaa, Yemen
Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei
Ankara, Turkey
Jasin, Malaysia
Islamabad, Pakistan
Bogota, Colombia
Santiago, Chile
Cape Town, South Africa
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Jakarta, Indonesia
Waterloo, Canada

  Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

Today in History

1099   Christian Crusaders march around Jerusalem as Muslims watch from within the city.
1608   The first French settlement at Quebec is established by Samuel de Champlain.
1663   The British crown grants Rhode Island a charter guaranteeing freedom of worship.
1686   The Austrians take Budapest from the Turks and annex Hungary.
1709   Peter the Great defeats Charles XII at Poltava, in the Ukraine, effectively ending the Swedish empire.
1755   Britain breaks off diplomatic relations with France as their disputes in the New World intensify.
1758   The British attack on Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga, New York, is foiled by the French.
1794   French troops capture Brussels, Belgium.
1815   With Napoleon defeated, Louis XVIII returns to Paris.
1822   29-year old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns while sailing in Italy.
1859   The Truce at Villafranca Austria cedes Lombardy to France.
1863   Demoralized by the surrender of Vicksburg, Confederates in Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrender to Union forces.
1864   Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston retreats into Atlanta to prevent being flanked by Union General William T. Sherman.
1865   Four of the conspirators in President Abraham Lincoln's assassination are hanged in Washington, D.C.
1879   The first ship to use electric lights departs from San Francisco, California.
1905   The mutinous crew of the battleship Potemkin surrenders to Rumanian authorities.
1918   Ernest Hemingway is wounded in Italy while working as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross.
1941   20 B-17s fly in their first mission with the Royal Air Force over Wilhelmshaven, Germany.
1943   American B-24 bombers strike Japanese-held Wake Island for the first time.
1960   The Soviet Union charges American pilot Francis Gary Powers with espionage.

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Alexander Hamilton

Though he never became president, Alexander Hamilton was one of the most influential—and controversial—of America’s founding fathers.
From his humble origins as an illegitimate child in the British West Indies to his famously untimely death, here are a few facts about the legendary politician that might surprise you.
 
1. Like many of today’s celebrities, Alexander Hamilton probably lied about his age.
The illegitimate son of a Scottish immigrant father and a British West Indian mother (who happened to be married to someone else), Alexander Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis on January 11. Hamilton himself claimed that he had been born in 1757, but official documents from Nevis list the year as 1755. Debate over this discrepancy has continued for more than two centuries, but most modern scholars agree that Hamilton likely changed his birth year intentionally. Shortly after Hamilton came into the world, his father James abandoned the family, fearful that the mother of his child would be charged with bigamy. In 1768, when Hamilton was likely 13 years old, his mother died, effectively leaving him an orphan. Shaving two years off his age would have made him a more desirable candidate for an apprenticeship to a local businessman. If this was Hamilton’s intent, it worked: He was soon hired by an import-export firm and quickly impressed his bosses. In 1772 they decided to send Hamilton to the American colonies to further his education. Arriving in his new home at the self-declared age of 15 and quickly diving into the political arena, Hamilton kept up the ruse, and his perceived precociousness only enhanced his reputation as a political prodigy.
2. Alexander Hamilton accomplished a lot—probably more than most people realize.
Though he never attained the highest office of his adopted country, few of America’s founders influenced its political system more than Alexander Hamilton. He was a member of the Continental Congress, an author of the Federalist Papers, a champion of the Constitution and the first secretary of the Treasury. But there’s so much more to Hamilton’s legacy. While serving in the Treasury, Hamilton helped found the first national bank, the U.S. Mint and the Revenue Cutter Service, a tax collection bureau that would later become the U.S. Coast Guard. So deeply involved in the development of the Cutter Service was Hamilton that the original naval communication guidebook he devised was still in use in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A strong proponent of manufacturing in the new nation, Hamilton and a series of private investors created the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures, which developed one of the first industrial centers in the United States, located in Paterson, New Jersey. In 1784 he founded the Bank of New York, America’s oldest continuous banking organization. And just seven years later Hamilton started a daily broadsheet—then known as the New-York Evening Post—that grew into one of the country’s most successful papers: the New York Post.
3. Alexander Hamilton was the subject of one of America’s first highly publicized political sex scandals.
In 1791 the married Hamilton met a young Philadelphia woman named Maria Reynolds, who claimed she needed cash because her husband had left her with a small daughter to support. Himself an orphan, Hamilton quickly agreed, but their financial arrangement soon morphed into a trickier entanglement as the pair embarked on an affair that would last more than three years. Maria Reynolds was no desperate housewife, however. She and her husband, James, had carefully planned the affair in an attempt to extort even larger amounts from then-Secretary Hamilton, who readily coughed up the sums. After James Reynolds was implicated in another financial scandal, he informed investigators—a group that included James Monroe and Frederick Muhlenberg—that Hamilton had been using government funds as hush money. When confronted with this, Hamilton admitted to the affair, but he also insisted that he had used his own personal funds to cover it up, even showing Monroe his love letters from Maria Reynolds as proof. Satisfied that this was a private matter, Monroe and Muhlenberg agreed not to expose Hamilton. However, Monroe gave the letters to his close friend Thomas Jefferson, one of Hamilton’s fiercest political enemies. Jefferson passed them on to publisher James Callender, already notorious as the preeminent 19th-century peddler of political gossip. In 1797 the scandal exploded after Callender printed the Reynolds-Hamilton letters in his paper. Hamilton, more concerned with how the allegations of misuse of public funds would hurt him politically than how the news would affect his family, went on the offensive. He published his own lengthy pamphlet in which he acknowledged the extramarital relationship. Hamilton was publicly applauded for his honesty, but his political career was effectively destroyed.
4. Alexander Hamilton and his eldest son were killed under similar circumstances and in the same location.
On July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton was shot and mortally wounded by Vice President Aaron Burr in one of the most famous duels in American history. Though this was Hamilton’s first—and last—duel, he was certainly no stranger to the practice. One of the most divisive and combative figures of his age, he had already been challenged to nearly a dozen duels during his life, but each time he had managed to avoid violence. His eldest son Philip, however, was not so lucky. In 1801, after witnessing a speech denouncing his father, 19-year-old Philip confronted New York lawyer George Eacker and demanded a retraction. When Eacker refused, a duel was set for November 20 in Weehawken, New Jersey. Eacker escaped unscathed, but Philip died an agonizing death the following day. The loss devastated the Hamilton family, and many historians believe it led to Hamilton’s own reluctance to fire directly at Aaron Burr during their legendary duel just three years later. Whatever his intentions, Hamilton missed his opponent but was promptly shot in the stomach; he died the next afternoon.
5. It took more than 200 years—and two moves—to finally establish a proper monument to Alexander Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton came to New York in 1772, and—with the exception of stints in the military and government—the city would remain his home for the rest of his life. In fact, Hamilton did more to promote and champion the interests of New York than any other founding father. For many years he and his growing family (there would be eight children in all) lived in a series of rented homes in lower Manhattan. After retiring from government service in 1795, Hamilton purchased a 32-acre parcel of land in modern-day Harlem, which was then considered a rural suburb of New York. He named it “the Grange” in honor of his father’s ancestral home in Scotland. The house was completed in 1802—nearly bankrupting the family in the process—and was the only home Hamilton ever owned. The fate of the Grange in the years following Hamilton’s 1804 death took some surprising turns—literally. In 1889 the house was donated to a New York church on the condition that it be moved from its original location to a new plot 250 feet away. In the 1960s, after it fell into severe disrepair, it was placed under the control of the National Park Service, which was tasked with finding a suitable location for the house and restoring it to its former glory. Because of steep budget cuts and the objections of community groups, it took almost 30 years to fulfill this pledge. In 2008, more than 200 years after Hamilton’s death, the Grange was placed on hydraulic lifts and successfully relocated to nearby St. Nicholas Park—land that is now city-owned but once fell within the original 32-acre Hamilton estate. In September 2011, following a $14.5 million facelift, it reopened to the public.

Seriously, When Will the Heat End?

There's a small amount of good news for some of us.  
heatwave

Stay-cool tips from desert-savvy Phoenix


Phoenicians have learned a thing or two about surviving scorching summer days. For people in other parts of the country who aren't used to hearing the weather man say, "It'll be cooling down to 105 tomorrow," here are a few unique tips from the Valley of the Sun:1. Keep your ride cool.
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It's the economy stupid

http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ucomics.com/nq120705.gif

US economy adds 80,000 jobs in June


The economy added only 80,000 jobs in June, the government said Friday, erasing any doubt that the United States is in a summer slump for the third year in a row.
   More

Man Makes Final Mortgage Payment in 800 Pounds of Pennies

Thomas Daigle handed his bank a pair of boxes filled with 62,000 pennies this year, The Milford Daily News reported.

Barclays knew about Libor corruption four years ago

Not only was the Libor manipulation crimes by Barclays openly discussed by a Barclays strategist, but the WSJ also reported at the same time about banks such as Citibank and JPMorgan that were "reporting significantly lower borrowing costs." What we need to know now is how many banks are currently under investigation for this crime. Again, when setting the Libor rates, the top and bottom four are discarded so we know there are a number of banks that will be involved.
While speaking this week, shamed CEO Bob Diamond claimed to have never heard of the Libor fixing until last month yet it is hard to believe that he wasn't aware of something like this. It either shows incompetence, negligence or that the banks are too large to be managed and need to be broken up to a more manageable level.

Have the banks finally reached their tipping point by going too far, too many times? I'm still not convinced because they are the government and they are the law but they're definitely in for some challenging months.

More from Bloomberg on the ongoing Libor ripoff.
Banks routinely misstated borrowing costs to the British Bankers' Association to avoid the perception they faced difficulty raising funds as credit markets seized up, said Tim Bond, a strategist at Barclays Capital.

"The rates the banks were posting to the BBA became a little bit divorced from reality," Bond, head of asset-allocation research in London, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. "We had one week in September where our treasurer, who takes his responsibilities pretty seriously, said: 'right, I've had enough of this, I'm going to quote the right rates.' All we got for our pains was a series of media articles saying that we were having difficulty financing."

MP pulls gun on opponent on Jordan TV

More from the Huffington Post on the scene that somehow makes the US gun nuts look relatively normal.

Jubilant Libyans hold 1st nationwide election in decades


But violence shows challenges ahead
Jubilant Libyans chose a new parliament Saturday in their first nationwide vote in decades, but violence and protests in the restive east underscored the challenges ahead as the oil-rich North African nation struggles to restore stability after the ouster of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
 More

Did you know ...

How critical thinkers lose their faith in god

About blame game going on at CNN over plummeting ratings

That a former IRS official calls for investigation into ALEC

About Mitt Romney and the 'new gilded age'

The truth be told

Mitt Romney doesn't know how Venn diagrams work

From Sociological Images's Lisa Wade:
Mitt Romney’s campaign put out a set of graphics illustrating a “gap” between what Obama promised and what he has delivered. The graphic is in the form of a Venn diagram, a visual designed to show the overlap between two conditions...
Unfortunately, Romney’s overlapping circles are not Venn diagrams, making the campaign somewhat ridiculous and giving nerdy liberals all over America a good chuckle.
HOW NOT TO VENN DIAGRAM

The truth hurts

Police Tape

An ACLU mobile app to secretly record the police
Police Tape is an Android app from the American Civil Liberties Union that is designed to allow citizens to covertly record the police. When activated, it hides itself from casual inspection, and it has a mode that causes it to send its recording to an ACLU-operated server, protecting against police seizure and deletion.
Citizens can hold police accountable in the palms of their hands with "Police Tape," a smartphone application from the ACLU of New Jersey that allows people to securely and discreetly record and store interactions with police, as well as provide legal information about citizens' rights when interacting with the police. Thanks to the generosity of app developer OpenWatch, the ACLU-NJ is providing Police Tape to the public free of charge.
The ACLU says that an iPhone version is "coming soon," though it remains to be seen whether something so potentially controversial passes muster with the App Store.
Police Tape

Fifteen Funny Celebrity Photobombs

Since celebrities get their pictures taken all the time, it only stands to reason that people will take the opportunity to join in the fun as often as they can …and the resulting pictures are going to be shared, you betcha! Unreality has a collection of 15 of the funniest. Shown here are Dick Van Dyke, Anthony Hopkins, and a guy who took his chances in front of the camera.

Blast from the past

Why diet soda makes you fat

 

There have been some interesting studies in the past showing the rise of obesity increasing at the same time as "diet" or "lite" food products gaining popularity. It would not be much of a surprise if the diet food industry knew of this problem years ago, but at least us on the outside know more now.

Eat this stuff at your own risk.
Consuming high amounts of fructose (a type of sugar), artificial sweeteners, and sugar alcohols (another type of low-calorie sweetener) cause your gut bacteria to adapt in a way that interferes with your satiety signals and metabolism, according to a new paper in Obesity Reviews. (If you've noticed you've been feeling tired all the time and gaining weight, your metabolism may be slowing.)

"An evolution of the gut flora to this new sweetener-rich environment has a potential to negatively impact our health," says Amanda Payne, Ph.D., lead author of the review.

How does that happen? As bacteria in the gut process food, they give off byproducts called short-chain fatty acids. These can be beneficial and serve as energy in the body. But as the sweetener-adapted bacteria thrive and become more efficient at processing large amounts of high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and sugar alcohols, they also produce more and more short-chain fatty acids. (Not to imply that sugar is any better than artificial sweeteners.)

In those high amounts, Payne says, short-chain fatty acids decrease satiety signals. "This signaling may cause disruptions in our feeling full and hence prevent us from stopping to eat when we should," Payne says.

Daily Comic Relief

Farming in Detroit

Could Detroit, which has the unenviable title of one of America's Most Miserable Cities, get back its mojo by becoming ... a farm?!
Not such a crazy idea, according to some:
Detroit has more than 200,000 vacant parcels—almost half of them residential plots—that generate no significant tax revenue and would cost more to maintain than the city can afford. Finding new uses for this land has become one of the most pressing challenges for a city that lost a quarter of its population in the past decade.
[Entrepreneur John Hantz] proposes to ease that burden by buying about 2,300 parcels and planting oak trees, then maybe fruit orchards and hydroponic vegetables. The hardwoods could be harvested and sold within a decade to customers looking for young trees, according to Hantz Farms.
Detroit "cannot create value until we create scarcity," Mr. Hantz says. "Large-scale farming could begin to take land out of circulation in a positive way."
Matthew Dolan of the Wall Street Journal has the story: here

Happy birthday sliced bread

...and other great inventions
The greatest thing ever celebrated its 84th birthday Saturday.  On July 7, 1928, a baker in Chillocothe, MO, who was so broke he had nothing left to lose took a leap of faith on a crazy idea - sliced bread.
Frank Bench, whose Chillocothe Bakery was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, bought a multi-bladed, medieval-looking, bread-slicing gizmo invented by Otto Rohwedder, of nearby Saint Joseph, MO, and introduced the world to the great idea to which all future great ideas would be compared.
Opponents said sliced bread would never go over because Americans were not lazy and would be glad to slice their own bread. Also, the naysayers chided, there was no way to slice bread without crushing and crumbling. And furthermore, sliced bread with all those exposed surfaces would go stale in no time.
But the notoriously skeptical citizens of the Show Me State snapped up loaves of Kleen Maid Sliced Bread as fast as Otto and Frank could crank them out, and a great product as well as an ageless idiom were born.
More

'Heart attack' sandwich can stay on NY menu


The Second Avenue Deli won a court fight with a Las Vegas-based burger joint Friday over the names of their gut-busting foods.

Fallen Angel ...

... gets stuck right on top of a house in Madrid.

Things are different in Tajikistan


Pamir has a special position. It's the most high-altitude region not only of Tajikistan but of all the former Soviet Union. Its Gorno-Badakhshanskaya autonomous region occupies almost a half of all the country but its population is only 3% from all the republic's one. Local citizens are officially considered to be Tajiks but in fact they are a group of peoples with their own languages, culture and even religion. Khorog is bordering Afghanistan. The town is inhabited by representatives of all Pamir peoples. There are some universities here. Locals like to study, it's a part of their religion. Though the local young people prefer English today, they are good at Russian too. Tourists like this place, there are many hotels and guest houses in the area. More

Texas vampire

 Wikipedia Commons 1 19 Bela Lugosi Dracula A 16-year-old was walking down a Corpus Christi, Texas street when he accidentally bumped into a man who responded by biting the boy on the neck. Then he flew ran off.  
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Honfleur, Normandie, France

"Mythbusters" stopped from airing show on RFID Chips

 
As reported by NBC Bay Area:
The crew was all set to air a show about how hackable and trackable RFID chips that are found in many credit cards are, when some big name advertisers stepped in to shut it down.
In this undated video, Adam Savage of Mythbusters talks about how the MB's crew sat down for a  conference call with Texas Instruments to discuss the tech behind the chips, and were surprised to find also on the line were chief legal reps from Visa, Discover, and American Express. The Discovery Channel was told if the show about RFID chips aired, the major credit card companies would pull all advertising from the cable network.
Guess who won that battle? Suffice to say, there was no Mythbusters episode about RFID chips.
Video at the link.

The Classic, Beautiful And Controversial Books That Changed Science Forever

Without the work of intellectual giants like Einstein, Newton and Darwin, we might still be in the dark ages. But how many scientists still read the dust-ridden texts where these luminaries first expounded their theories?

Thanks to the internet, you no longer have to hunt down these yellowing tomes in a moldy library vault. Here's the story of 9 famous publications that spun the scientific world off its orbit.

What the Vikings did for fun

They played a ball game called knatleikr:
This detail comes from a new article, ‘What the Vikings did for fun? Sports and pastimes in medieval northern Europe’, which was published last month in the journal World Archaeology. In it Leszek GardeÅ‚a of the University of Aberdeen uses saga accounts and archaeological evidence to see what men, women and children from Scandinavia and Iceland amused themselves with during the Viking-era, and found that their were several popular pastimes.

For example, a ball game called knattleikr was played, which involved at least four men throwing a ball, chasing and running, and sometimes also involved a bat. GardeÅ‚a relates that in the saga of Egill Skallagrimsson, a game was arranged that brought people from around the district to watch. The story goes that “Egill, who must have been under 12 years old, was competing against an 11-year-old boy named Grımr, who seems to have been much stronger. At some point Egill lost his temper and struck his opponent with a bat, but was immediately seized and dashed to the ground. After complaining about these events to his friend Þorðr Granason, Egill took an axe and drove it into Grimr’s head.”
Other pastimes, like wrestling in the water and stone-lifting, are mentioned at the Medievalists.net link.

"Frankenstein" Bog Mummies Discovered in Scotland

Two ancient bodies made from six people, new study reveals. A Bronze Age mummy.
A female Bronze Age mummy from Cladh Hallan is a composite of different skeletons.
Photograph courtesy Mike Parker Pearson, University of Sheffield
by Rachel Kaufman

In a "eureka" moment worthy of Dr. Frankenstein, scientists have discovered that two 3,000-year-old Scottish "bog bodies" are actually made from the remains of six people.
According to new isotopic dating and DNA experiments, the mummies—a male and a female—were assembled from various body parts, although the purpose of the gruesome composites is likely lost to history.
The mummies were discovered more than a decade ago below the remnants of 11th-century houses at Cladh Hallan, a prehistoric village on the island of South Uist (map), off the coast of Scotland.
The bodies had been buried in the fetal position 300 to 600 years after death. (See bog body pictures.)
Based on the condition and structures of the skeletons, scientists had previously determined that the bodies had been placed in a peat bog just long enough to preserve them and then removed. The skeletons were then reburied hundreds of years later.

Terry Brown, a professor of biomedical archaeology at the University of Manchester, said there were clues that these bog bodies were more than they seemed.
On the female skeleton, "the jaw didn't fit into the rest of the skull," he said. "So Mike [Parker Pearson, of Sheffield University] came and said, Could we try to work it out through DNA testing?"
Brown sampled DNA from the female skeleton's jawbone, skull, arm, and leg. The results show that bones came from different people, none of whom even shared the same mother, he said.
The female is made from body parts that date to around the same time period. But isotopic dating showed that the male mummy is made from people who died a few hundred years apart.
Quick Dip in the Bog
Another clue to the odd nature of the Cladh Hallan mummies is their unusually well-preserved bones.
A peat bog is a high-acid, low-oxygen environment, which inhibits the bacteria that break down organics, said Gill Plunkett, a lecturer in paleoecology at Queen's University Belfast who was not involved in the current study.
"The combined conditions are particularly good for the preservation of most organic materials," she said.
"But on the other hand, the acidic conditions will attack calcium-based materials," so most known bog bodies have better preserved skin and soft tissue than bones.

In the Cladh Hallan bodies, the bones are still articulated—attached to each other as they would be in life. This suggests that the buriers removed the bodies from the peat bog after preservation but before acid destroyed the bones.
When the mummies were later reburied in soil, the soft tissue again began to break down.
The researchers aren't sure why the villagers went through this unusual process, or why they built composite mummies in the first place.
A cynical theory, study author Brown said, assumes that the Bronze Age people of Cladh Hallan were just eminently practical: "Maybe the head dropped off and they got another head to stick on."
Another possibility is that the merging was deliberate, to create a symbolic ancestor that literally embodied traits from multiple lineages.
Brown cites the example of the Chinchorro mummies discovered in the Chilean Andes, where embalmers reinforced or reconstructed bodies with sticks, grass, animal hair, or even sea lion skin.
"It seems the person is not so important, but the image is. So it's not a single identity, but it's representing something."

More Combo Mummies Out There?
According to Brown, there may be other composite bodies waiting to be discovered.
Often when scientists study the DNA of very ancient remains, they sample only one part of a body to prevent needless damage to the skeleton.
Additional composite bodies, if they exist, are likely to come from such long-ago time periods.
"I think you'd have to go back to a time when the rituals were more bizarre," Brown said. "You'd have to go back to the mists of unrecorded time."
The new paper about the composite female mummy appears in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Awesome Pictures

Double rainbow sydney

Milky Way Galaxy at Its Best in July Night Sky

The next two weeks offer the best chance to see the Milky Way.
  Read more
milky way

X-Rated

The Sun Erupts With a Powerful Solar Flare
On Friday, the sun erupted with the most powerful class of eruption, an X1.1 solar flare -- the biggest in months.  
Read more
X-Rated: Sun Erupts With a Powerful Solar Flare

The Colors of Titan and Saturn

Recent Cassini images reveal the complementary colors of a planet and its moon 
titan saturn

"Lightning Ridge" Black Opal

This beautiful mineral from Australia seem to contain lightning inside of it...

(image credit: Matt Wood)

Also, look at the red opal variety here.

Deathstalker

What a fitting name for this particularly ghastly kind of a scorpion: The Deathstalker (Leiurus quinquestriatus)!
(image credit: Matt Reinbold)
The photographer Matt Reinbold says: "This is just what it would look like in real life... All scorpions glow under blacklight. Combined with the ambient light in the room, this is what it looks like." Some scorpions in Utah glow a vivid green color!

Ode to Gonyaulax polyedra

Poetry doesn't usually come to mind when talking about science, but Maria Popova of Brain Pickings came across what is considered the first poem ever published in a strictly scientific journal.
It's from Smith College professor Mary E. Harrington, who wrote the poem about the bioluminescent algae Gonyaulax polyedra:
If the lazy dinoflagellate
should lay abed
refuse to photosynthesize,
realize:
the clock will not slow

but it will grow fait
weaker
weaker

barely whispering at the end
”rise”
”rise”

to little effect.
The recalcitrant Gonyaulax
arms crossed
snorts
“No longer will
they call my life
(my life!)
‘just hands’.
I am sticking to the sea bed!”

The Two-Faced Cuttlefish


Image: Culum Brown
We frown at two-faced people, but when it comes to cuttlefish, being two-faced makes smart evolutionary sense. Culum Brown of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, discovered that a male cuttlefish would display two different markings when courting a female:
Talk about showing your feminine side. On one flank, a courting male cuttlefish looks like a normal male of his species, with tigerlike stripes extending horizontally down his skin. But on the other, he resembles a female, displaying marbled browns and whites. He needs the male pattern to attract the female, while the female motif keeps competing males from fighting him. That’s scientists’ best guess for now, at least, to explain the devious cuttlefish behavior that they’ve observed and reported for the first time.

Animal Pictures