The Daily Drift

Yeah, we're like that ...

Some of our reader today have been in:

Taytay, Philippines

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Baghdad, Iraq

Seremban, Malaysia

Banjul, Gambia

Cape Town, South Africa

Kampala, Uganda

Hanoi, Vietnam

Karachi, Pakistan

Petalina Jaya, Malaysia

Naples, Italy

Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia

Tiraspol, Modolva

Slough, England

Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Amman, Jordan

Rivonia, South Africa

Warsaw, Poland

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Riyadh, Saudi Abraia

Yerevan, Armenia

Johannesburg, South Africa

Pekanbaru, Indonesia

Kampot, Cambodia

San Pedro, Philippines

Aberdeen, Scotland

Novi Sad, Serbia

Jakarta, Indonesia

Manila, Philippines

Belgrade, Serbia

Sialkot, Pakistan

Edinburgh, Scotland

Kuwait, Kuwait

Ankara, Turkey

Algiers, Algeria

Kiev, Ukraine

Sofia, Bulgaria

Minsk, Belarus

Tirana, Albania

Maharagama, Sri Lanka

Slavutich, Ukraine

Izmir, Turkey

Jawa, Indonesia

Niagara Falls, Canada

Katowice, Poland

Makati, Philippines

Port-Of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Lahore, Pakistan

Beirut, Lebanon

Chrzanow, Poland

Islamabad, Pakistan

Burnaby, Canada

Asaba, Nigeria
 

Today is Pooh (Winnie, The) Day

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Non Sequitur

Today in History

1486		Henry VII marries Elizabeth of York.
1701		Frederick III, the elector of Brandenburg, becomes king of Prussia.
1778		Captain James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands, naming them the 'Sandwich Islands' after the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich.
1836		Jim Bowie arrives at the Alamo to assist its Texas defenders.
1862		John Tyler, former president of the U.S., is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.
1902		The Isthmus Canal Commission in Washington shifts its support from Nicaragua to Panama as a favored canal site.
1910		Aviator Eugene Ely performs his first successful take off and landing from a ship in San Francisco.
1916		The Russians force the Turkish 3rd Army back to Erzurum.
1942		General MacArthur repels the Japanese in Bataan. The United States took the lead in the Far East war criminal trials.
1945		The German Army launches its second attempt to relieve the besieged city of Budapest from the advancing Red Army.
1948		Ghandi breaks a 121-hour fast after halting Muslem-Hindu riots.
1962		The United States begins spraying foliage with herbicides in South Vietnam, in order to reveal the whereabouts of Vietcong guerrillas.
1964		Plans are disclosed for the World Trade Center in New York.
1978		The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) isolate the cause of Legionnaire's disease.
1991		Iraq starts firing Scud missiles at Israeli cities.

The repugicans Call Him a Dictator, But Obama Has Issued Fewest Executive Orders in 100 Years

After his gun control announcement, repugicans immediately called President Obama a dictator and an imperial president, but the truth is that the president has issued the fewest executive orders of any president over the last 100 years.
Republicans immediately and predictably went off the rails as soon as the president mentioned executive action and guns. Rep. Paul Broun said, “There is a tremendous potential for a horrendous public backlash against the president if he continues the policies that he has been doing of trying to go around Congress, create law and be a dictator like he’s been doing.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (r-FL) accused the president of abusing his power, “Making matters worse is that President Obama is again abusing his power by imposing his policies via executive fiat instead of allowing them to be debated in Congress. President Obama’s frustration with our republic and the way it works doesn’t give him license to ignore the Constitution.”
Rep. Darrell Issa said, “The president’s imperial behavior and his abuse of power didn’t begin with the Second Amendment. He did it with immigration. He’s certainly done it with the Obamacare. So, once again, it’s a president exceeding his intended authority.”
A funny thing happened on the way to Obama is dictator who is taking away all of guns Republican Memeville. New York Magazine crunched the numbers of presidential executive orders and concluded that this president has issued the fewest executive orders of any president over the last 100 years. Every Republican president signed more executive orders than Barack Obama has. On an order per day basis, Obama has issued fewer EOs than every single repugican president over the past century.
This fact will not stop repugicans from claiming that President Obama is stealing their rights, but it does demonstrate how far apart perception and reality are for the right. With their comments today, repugicans demonstrated that they are more interested in name calling and scoring political points with their base than seriously discussing the root causes of gun violence.
The right is still feeding their myth of the imaginary imperial dictator Obama, and everything this president does will be viewed through their collective Obama delusion.

The tea party’s Intolerable Acts Are a Parting Shot from George III

The tea party’s Inspiration: King George III.

The repugicans are wedded to their theories of government (aka liberal) tyranny but all the evidence, and I do mean the entirety of the available evidence, demonstrates that tyranny is imposed not by the political left but by the political right.
We have actual and ongoing examples in both Wisconsin and Michigan of what repugican governance looks like, and it’s not pretty. It is the suppression of the will of the people, in complete violation of everything the United States stands for: that political power derives from the will of the people.
According to tea party political philosophy, political power derives from corporations, plutocrats, and religious fanatics. These oligarchs have a message for you: “Fuck you.” And ironically, given Tea Party pretensions, that is precisely the attitude of King George III in 1774.
In fact, despite all the talk about Obama acting like George III, it is the tea party that has embraced the imperial British heritage. The Colonists in the days, weeks, and months leading up to the Revolution were literally up in arms over the Massachusetts Government Act of May 20, 1774.
Kevin Philips in his 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (2012) describes the effect of this measure:

The Massachusetts Charter of 1691 was eviscerated. Key provisions of the new statute all but eliminated town meetings, ended locally chosen juries, gave the governor sole power to appoint and remove judges, and transferred the selection of the Governor’s Council, the upper legislative house, from elected representatives to Crown appointees.

Is the first thing that comes to your mind the tea party rape of Michigan democracy? PoliticusUSA has extensively covered the imposition of tea party tyranny in Michigan, which just as did the Massachusetts Government Act, ignore the will of the people.
Even when the outrageous use of “emergency managers,” analogous to the Crown’s appointment of judges and legislators, were overwhelmingly revoked by the people, the governor ignored the vote – simply pretended it hadn’t happened. Governor Rick Snyder and the tea party have no more interest in what the people want than did George III and his ministers.
The colonists, for reasons you can readily understand, called this act and others like it the Intolerable Acts. And they were intolerable. The suspension of local democracy is a serious matter because Democracy is not imposed from the top down but created from the bottom up. The repugicans know this, which is why they are so intent on destroying it at the local level through imposition of the very [heavy-handed] government they claim to hate.
These acts are just as intolerable today. And they are no more an expression of the popular will in 2012 than they were in 1774, but rather the act of a tyrannical and authoritarian mindset intent on imposing the will of a powerful minority on the majority.
For the British, the Intolerable Acts were the Coercive Acts, a no more inspiring if somewhat more precise name for the legislation. The Coercive Acts (the others were the Quartering Act, the Boston Port Bill, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Quebec Act) were meant to do just that: coerce the colonists into obedience.
The tea party laws in Wisconsin and Michigan (and elsewhere; these two states are merely the most complete examples) trace their lineage directly back to the Prime Minister, Lord North, who said that the Massachusetts Government Act was intended “to take the executive power from the hands of the democratic part of government.” In other words, as Black Liberal Boomer put it, “Strangle Blue States [or colonies] in the Crib.”
As a result, the Tea Party adoption of patriot flags and garb is not only hypocritical; it is nothing short of obscene. Christopher Gladsen could never have imagined his “Don’t Tread on Me” flag would be used not as an expression of liberty, but of tyranny.
Yet again and again repugicans like Rand Paul, insist that it is the Democrats who are behaving in a tyrannical fashion. It does not matter that most of what they say is composed of lies, often old lies that have been retold countless times and proven false on each and every occasion. And they have proven that, if thwarted, there is no limit to what they will stoop to in revenge.
World Net Daily is, no surprise, a hotbed of such stupidity. But they are hardly alone. Faux News reaches a far wider market and is only a little less absurdist in its claims, and there is also Breitbart.com and The Blaze, Drudge Report, and others. All of them would have you believe that conservatives champion liberty while liberals want to impose tyranny.
The fact is that conservatism is not about liberty, but about maintenance of the status quo, which is often diametrically opposed to the concept of liberty (the continuation of slavery and the disenfranchisement of women being two notable examples). Liberalism, on the other hand, is about liberty, about the granting, not the suppression of rights. Liberty demands that people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds and economic statuses have the same rights, which is, after all, what the Constitution grants them.
Every law restricting this right to equality comes from the repugican cabal, whether it is limiting your right to employment, equal pay, free exercise of speech or religion, or even voting.
That is when the repugicans have charge of any government local, state, or Federal. Where they lack complete authority, as in the President and Senate, they foment rebellion, and quite openly. Just as the colonies were in revolt well before the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (as King George III recognized in October, 1774 when he forbade the export of war supplies to the Colonies), the repugican cabal is already in revolt against the parts of the Federal government it does not control. The current scramble to obtain firearms can be likened to the colonist’s mad scramble to obtain both firearms and powder in 1774 and 1775. Americans waiting for the ball to drop do not realize that it has already fallen.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in The American Crisis during the winter of 1776. If the American Revolution, as opposed to the American War for Independence has never ended, as some have argued, those words are doubly applicable today, as we face the long-awaiting counter-revolution of conservatism.

Michelle Bachmann stiffs her campaign staff, they retaliate by ratting to the feds

Senior campaign staffers who worked for Michelle Bachmann in the 2012 race say that she's refused to pay them unless they sign an NDA promising not to disclose any criminal and unethical activity they witnessed on the campaign. Now it seems that some are fed up with dickering with Bachmann for what they're owed, and are just going to the feds with their tales of corruption and crime:

[Peter Waldron, a widely known evangelist enlisted by the Bachmann campaign for outreach to Christian conservatives], formerly Bachmann's national field coordinator, is accusing the campaign of improperly dipping into money from MichelePAC to pay longtime fundraising consultant Guy Short for presidential campaign work he performed in the critical final weeks ahead of Iowa's caucuses last year.
Waldron also alleges that the campaign concealed payments to Iowa state campaign chairman Kent Sorenson, a state senator who abruptly left the Bachmann camp to join then-U.S. Rep. Ron Paul's insurgent campaign. Under Iowa Senate rules, Waldron maintains, Sorenson could not perform paid work for a presidential campaign.
...One of those involved in the payment dispute is Barbara Heki, who sued the campaign last year over the use of a database listing the names and e-mail addresses of thousands of Christian home-school families. Although the campaign eventually agreed to pay $2,000 for the list, the lawsuit continues, as does a separate criminal investigation.

Ex-Bachmann aide alleges campaign finance violations

CEOs insist Americans need to work until 70

Nothing says “shared sacrifice” quite like a rich guy telling everyone else they need to work longer.We already know that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have spent a lifetime living off of government money, yet now want to cut that money for everyone else.
We have also heard Wall Street leaders promote cuts to the social system, while ignoring their own multi-billion dollar handouts. And the $182 billion handout queen from AIG, from the comfort of his Mediterranean villa, let everyone know that maybe Americans needed to work until they were 70 or 80.

 

Now we have more pampered American CEOs daring to step forward and insist on other Americans working harder and longer. How thoughtful of them.
One of those CEO’s is AT&T’s Randall Stephenson. He also thinks that Americans need to work until they are 70 years old. Stephenson received a $2.08 million pay cut – that’s right, a cut – last year for a failed deal on his watch. Most Americans won’t make $2.08 million in their lifetime, let along have their pay cut by that much.
Stephenson still made out okay though, coming in at $22 million for the year. He’s probably going to retire with the usual benefits that are denied regular workers, but yes, he thinks you need to work longer. Over the last five years, Stephenson has made $81.29 million, according to Forbes.
What the pampered 1% somehow misses is that corporate profits are roaring to record levels. Yes, under the far left-wing, Hugo Chavez-loving, rebirth of Stalin and Hitler administration of Barack Obama, corporate profits have out performed the Reagan years. Yes, a Marxist like Obama out performed Saint Reagan!

U.S. corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by 171 percent under Obama, more than under any president since World War II, and are now at their highest level relative to the size of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Profits are more than twice as high as their peak during President Ronald Reagan’s administration and more than 50 percent greater than during the late-1990s Internet boom, measured by the size of the economy.

But no, this isn’t enough for the likes of Stephenson, Blankfein, Bowles and Simpson, who see the need for the middle class to get their act together and work harder. It’s a bit like the old joke from the days of the Soviet Union, when Moscow would wire countries like Vietnam or Cuba and say it was time they had to tighten their belts. The response would be: “send belts.”
If only today’s corporate executives were trying to be funny. Sadly, they’re quite serious, which only proves how out of touch  they truly are.
Unemployment rates for older workers currently remain lower than for younger workers, but when an older worker loses a job, finding a new job can take almost a year. This is a real problem. As more Millenials (a very large group) come into the work force, they are also likely to put pressure on the system, and older workers may be forced out to make room. We just don’t know.
In addition, we have seen exploding healthcare costs and stagnating earnings for most people, other than the pampered 1% executives and elite government workers (like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson) who are set with health insurance and other retirement benefits that are far beyond what most workers see today. When is the last time you met someone who went into a new job that actually had a good retirement program (or any at all), besides a Wall Street giveaway 401K?
How legitimate is it to accept the word of some of the most privileged that have everything to gain financially by squeezing the middle class? When is enough enough for them, and for us?
All of us are equal, but some of us are more equal than others.
CNBC:

Executives of the Business Roundtable are urging Congress to raise the Social Security and Medicare age eligibility to 70, from the current 67 [sic], and to adopt means testing for wealthier retirees, in order to keep the entitlement programs solvent longer-term.
“When you look long-term at the U.S. fiscal health, you have to look at these questions,” said Business Roundtable President John Engler during meeting with reporters in Washington Tuesday.

Let them eat cake, Mr. Stephenson?

“It’s the power of compound savings here,” said Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, and vice chair of the group’s health and retirement committee. “If you start to save now, it really adds up.”

Did you know ...

That Joe Biden has become the most influential vice president in history

That Obama created a new national park

That conspiracy theorists (read: lunatic fruitcakes) who believe that the Sandy Hook victims were actors hired by the government

That Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o does not have a dead girlfriend

That christian fundamentalists (read: lunatic fruitcakes) freak out over yoga in the military

A Minnesota union leader says tax the rich and raise welfare grants

That the NRA had a less-than-1% rate of return for investors in the last election

We all know that comment trolls suck, but now there's scientific proof!

The truth be told

US commandos boost numbers to train Mexican forces

 

The Pentagon is stepping up aid for Mexico's bloody drug war with a new U.S.-based special operations headquarters to teach Mexican security forces how to hunt drug cartels the same way special operations teams hunt al-Qaida, according to documents and interviews with multiple U.S. officials.

Such assistance could help newly elected Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto establish a military force to focus on drug criminal networks that have terrorized Mexico's northern states and threatened the U.S. Southwest border. Mexican officials say warring drug gangs have killed at least 70,000 people between 2006 and 2012.

Based at the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado, Special Operations Command-North will build on a commando program that has brought Mexican military, intelligence and law enforcement officials to study U.S. counterterrorist operations, to show them how special operations troops built an interagency network to target al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden and his followers.

The special operations team within Northcom will be turned into a new headquarters, led by a general instead of a colonel. It was established in a Dec. 31 memo signed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. That move gives the group more autonomy and the number of people could eventually quintuple from 30 to 150, meaning the headquarters could expand its training missions with the Mexicans, even though no new money is being assigned to the mission.

The special operations program has already helped Mexican officials set up their own intelligence center in Mexico City to target criminal networks, patterned after similar centers in war zones built to target al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Iraq, two current U.S. officials said.
Mexican and U.S. military officials played down the change, and it's unclear whether the Mexican government will agree to boost its training.
"We are merely placing a component commander in charge of things we are already doing," said Northcom spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis in a written statement.

Mexico's Foreign Affairs Department emailed a statement saying it had been briefed on the changes and had no further comment

The creation of the new command marks another expansion of Adm. Bill McRaven's special operations empire, as he seeks to migrate special operators from their decade of service in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to new missions, even as the rest of the military fights postwar contraction and multibillion-dollar budget cuts.

The new headquarters will also coordinate special operations troops when needed for domestic roles like rescuing survivors after a natural disaster, or helping the U.S. Coast Guard strike ships carrying suspect cargo just outside U.S. territorial waters, according to multiple current and former U.S. officials briefed on the mission. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the Pentagon has not formally announced the new headquarters.

The initial document petitioning Panetta for the command stresses the command's role in military-to-military cooperation with Mexico. The document was signed in September 2012 by McRaven and Northcom commander Gen. Charles Jacoby.

Northcom's current special operations training missions are an outgrowth of the Merida Initiative that was formalized in 2008, to provide extensive military assistance to Mexico. The extra special-operations staff, including both troops and civilians, will help coordinate more missions as Mexico requests them, current and former officials said.

Pena Nieto is likely to welcome the continued training to help him build and coordinate the forces he needs to reduce drug violence, according to Rand Corp.'s Dr. Agnes Gereben Schaefer.

"He has talked about setting up a paramilitary force...made up of former military and police forces, which he has described as more surgical," than the current campaign by Mexican army and police, Schaefer said. He would dispatch the force into towns that have been overrun by drug violence, where police don't have the numbers to fight it, she said.

Mexican military, intelligence and law enforcement chiefs have already toured the Joint Special Operations Command headquarters at Fort Bragg in North Carolina to see how U.S. officers coordinate efforts by special operations aircraft, naval vessels and air- and sea-based raiders, according to one current military official.

A small group of top Mexican military and intelligence officials also visited the command's targeting center at the Balad air base in Iraq before the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011, a former U.S. official said.

U.S. officials stress that sharing this expertise does not mean U.S. special operations teams will be conducting raids against targets in Mexico, nor will they be entering the country with their own weapons. Mexico forbids U.S. military or law enforcement officers from carrying guns inside their borders, with few exceptions, though American commandos have conducted training missions in the past, two current and one former U.S. military official said. They were speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive missions.

Man murders mom in sacrifice for health of Hugo Chavez

A man in Venezuela "sacrificed" his mom in a brutal murder, as a spiritual offering for the health of President Hugo Chavez, who has advanced cancer. He hit his mother, who was 80; then he severed her hands and arms, and finally, burned her corpse.

Shipment of 18 human heads intercepted at airport

"Because the shipment's paperwork was not in order, agents confiscated the heads and sent them to the Cook County Medical Examiner for safekeeping."

The protective power of antioxidants might be vastly oversold

Scientists are beginning to question the idea that free-radicals cause aging and, with that, the entire basis of the antioxidant industrial complex. Maybe, now, everything can stop tasting of acai berries.

This Family Lives on an Ice-Locked Boat in the Arctic.

On Purpose!

They had already spent five years on a boat in the Svalbard Islands north of Norway. That wasn't quite extreme enough for the Brossier family. For two years, they've lived on their 15-meter boat Vagabond in Grise Fiord in northern Canada. At the moment, the boat is ice-locked. But they can handle it:

This is the second year the family has spent in Grise Fiord, but Brossier and his family are no strangers to living on a boat in the Arctic. They also spent five years on a boat near Spitsbergen, which is an island near Norway. Brossier’s eldest daughter was only 12 days old when her parents first brought her on board.

“Our neighbours were really the polar bears. I think we saw 800 polar bears in five years so it was not many people,” he said. [...]
“We live here without any agenda and without any tight schedule. When you start something you have time to finish it,” he said. “Of course there are some things we cannot do. We miss mainly our families but we are already with our own little family… and it’s easier nowadays to keep in touch with Skype and the internet.”

More

De-frosting a building-sized refrigerator

The Fulton Market Cold Storage Company building in Chicago has been, well, storing cold things since the 1920s. But last July, the company sold the building and moved to a more modern facility outside town, leaving the old cold storage warehouse to be turned into offices.
But first, the new owners had to defrost it.

Video

The Fulton Market Cold Storage building has ice-covered walls for the same reason a freezer can get covered in hard, packed ice. When you put something into a freezer — say, a giant slab of beef fresh from a slaughterhouse — that thing contains moisture. There's liquid trapped inside it. Over time, especially if it's not sealed very well, that moisture will turn into water vapor in the air. When temperature changes cause that vapor to condense back into liquid, it instantly freezes — turning to ice anywhere it touches.
In your fridge at home, that's just an annoyance. At the Fulton Market Cold Storage building, it was epic.
Besides the video linked above, you should really check out the amazing photos taken for the ice, pre-melt, by photographer Gary Jensen.

Warp Speed

What Hyperspace Would Really Look Like

The science fiction vision of stars flashing by as streaks when spaceships travel faster than light isn't what the scene would actually look like, a team of physics students says. Instead, the view out the windows of a vehicle traveling through hyperspace would be more like a centralized bright glow, calculations show.

GOLD!

GOLD! Huge $315K Nugget Unearthed in Australia

An Australian amateur prospector has hit the proverbial jackpot. ->

Five Of The World's Most Mystifying Ghost Towns

Here are Five of the World's Most Mystifying Ghost Towns.

Where Did the Phrase 'Caught Red Handed' Come From?

Given how it was used in the earliest references, the phrase 'red hand' or 'redhand' probably referred to people caught with blood on their hands from murder or poaching. The first documented mention of 'red hand' is in the Scottish Acts of Parliament of James I, written in 1432.

Useful words with no English equivalent

Surprisingly, they're not all long, Germanic compound words (generally a font of useful no-equivalent words):

8. Tartle (Scots)
The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can't quite remember.
9. Koi No Yokan (Japanese)
The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall in love.
10. Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego)
This word captures that special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do.

Tartle is something I often experience, because I'm really, embarrassingly terrible with names.

14 wonderful words with no English equivalent

Utensils probably gave us all overbites

According to a new book, the human overbite developed at different times, in different places — and was always coincident with the widespread use of eating utensils. In Europe, for instance, evidence suggests that humans have only had an overbite for about 250 years. —

Random Photo

Seven Out of Ten Most Air-Polluted Cities Are in China

7 of 10 Most Air-Polluted Cities Are in China

The air-quality monitoring device atop the United States Embassy in Beijing had recorded the highest pollution levels yet.

Deforestation Robs Amazon Soil of Life

Deforestation Robs Amazon Soil of Life

It's not just the animals in the forest that are robbed of their home due to deforestation, microbial diversity is lost as well.

Global Warming Brings Earlier Spring Flowers

Global Warming Brings Earlier Spring Flowers

The warmest springs on record have caused flowers in two historic sites to bloom at their earliest dates in decades.

Ten Spectacular Volcanic Plugs and Natural Monoliths

Look at this huge limestone pillar -and there's a little church on top! The only way to get there is by ladder. It's in the village of Katskhi in western Georgia (the European one). There are many monoliths like this around the world, and for some reason, people always want to build something on top. See ten such sites at The World Geography.

Ancient 'Killer Walrus' Not So Deadly After All

An artist's rendition of the extinct walrus, Pelagiarctos thomasi

 

A "killer walrus" thought to have terrorized the North Pacific 15 million years ago may not have been such a savvy slayer after all, researchers say.
A new analysis of fossil evidence of the prehistoric beast shows it was more of a fish-eater than an apex predator with a bone-crushing bite.
Traces of the middle Miocene walrus, named Pelagiarctos thomasi, were first found in the 1980s in the Sharktooth Hill bone bed of California. A chunk of a robust jawbone and sharp pointed teeth, which resembled those of the bone-cracking hyena, led researchers to believe the walrus ripped apart birds and other marine mammals in addition to the fish that modern walruses eat today.
But a more complete lower jaw and teeth from the long-gone species were recently discovered in the Topanga Canyon Formation near Los Angeles. Researchers say the shape of the teeth from this new specimen suggest the walrus was unlikely adapted to regularly feed on large prey. Instead, they think it was a generalist predator, feasting on fish, invertebrates and the occasional warm-blooded snack.
"When we examined the new specimen and the original fossils, we found that the teeth really weren't that sharp at all — in fact, the teeth looked like scaled-up versions of the teeth of a much smaller sea lion," researcher Robert Boessenecker, a geology doctoral student at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told the PLOS ONE Community Blog.
Using a model to estimate body size based on the size of the jaw, Boessenecker and Morgan Churchill of the University of Wyoming found that Pelagiarctos was quite large — about 770 pounds (350 kilograms), or similar in size to some modern male sea lions. But they noted that a big body alone likely wouldn't indicate that the species was a dominant predator. That's because both large and small modern species in the pinniped family — which includes seals, sea lions and walruses — are dietary generalists that tend to eat mostly fish.
Boessenecker added that the new findings give a clearer picture of the modern walrus' evolutionary past.
"Right now, there is only one modern walrus species but back then, walruses were a very diverse group," the researcher told the PLOS blog. "Many of these other extinct walruses had strange adaptations — such as the development of upper and lower tusks, gigantic body size, ultradense bones, unusually short forelimbs, and even the loss of all teeth aside from tusks. The myriad types of extinct walruses — Pelagiarctos included — beautifully demonstrate the often convoluted path that evolution can take."

Chimps Have a Sense of Fairness

Chimps and humans have a similar sense of fairness, a new study shows.

 

Humans aren't the only ones who cry "no fair." In a classic test of fairness called the ultimatum game, apes will dole out an equitable share of their bananas — and when they don't, their partners will complain, a new study shows.
The findings, published today (Jan. 14) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that humans and chimpanzees may share an evolved sense of fairness common to many cooperative species, said lead study author Darby Proctor, a primatologist at Emory University.
"If you're involved in some cooperative act you need to be sure you're engaging in something that's beneficial to you," Proctor told LiveScience. "Comparing your rewards with others' seems like it would be really, really important."
Fair and square
In a classic economic trial called the ultimatum game, people are given $100 and can give some fraction of it to an anonymous partner they'll never see again. The recipients can reject the offer if they don't like it, in which case both people get nothing.
Rationally, the "smart" response would be to take any offer, no matter how low, but participants routinely reject offers lower than $10 or $20, said Manfred Milinski, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, who was not involved in the study. Most people offer around $40 to their partners and in some countries, people offer more than half of the money to partners, Milinski told LiveScience.
Selfish apes
But past studies of the ultimatum game in chimpanzees (with raisins) had suggested our closest living relatives were "rational maximizers" who would accept even the stingiest offering without getting ruffled. They even accepted zero-raisin offers without even a squawk. That suggested their main goal — getting more tasty raisins — overrode any meager sense of fairness they may have had.
Those studies, however, instantly started a new round of the game if the apes accepted, but made them wait a full minute after rejecting the offer, raising the possibility that the apes realized it was more fruitful to accept quickly to get more raisins, rather than rejecting low-ball offers.
Chimps and children
In the new study, the team trained the primates to dole out tokens that stood for bananas, with one token symbolizing an equal split, while the other was an unfair deal that benefitted the first chimp. (See a Video of Chimps' Ultimatum Game)
No chimp recipients rejected unfair offers, but they did occasionally hiss, spit or shout at unequal distributions. One recipient even spit a mouthful of water at its partner, Proctor said.
At first the chimps were stingy, but very quickly, they switched to offering equitable splits in the ultimatum game.
To test the method, the researchers had 3- to 5-year-old children participate in a similar experiment using stickers instead of bananas. The little ones started out greedy but quickly offered the tokens for fairer distributions of stickers. And those who got a raw deal complained.
"Their reactions struck me as very similar to the chimps," Proctor said. "They would say things like 'You got more stickers than me,' or 'I want more stickers.'"
The findings suggest chimp and human sense of fairness aren't so different, Milinski said.
"I am not surprised we are so similar to chimps. We are not unique," Milinski told LiveScience.

Fisherman caught giant goldfish in lake

A giant goldfish was caught in Lake St. Clair, between the Province of Ontario and the State of Michigan, last Friday. Mike Martin loves to fish. He has been fishing for 20 years. "First one I've ever caught and I fish it religiously," said Martin.

"We see them all the time but, to actually catch them is rare," he said. "Everybody wants to just dump them off their seawall and let them be free and this is what they turn into."

The fish was over 3 pounds and nearly 15 inches long. Martin caught it while ice fishing for perch. He says he thought it was just a big perch on the line before he saw what it really was. "Definitely not a perch," he said.

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Martin says he called his father after the catch "I didn't know what to do with it, what do you do with a goldfish?" His father told him to put it in a bucket and take it home. "This will probably be the only one I ever catch so he's going to go on the wall," said Martin.

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