By The Way...

Monday, July 31, 2006
8:45:00 AM EDT
Hearing Groove is in the Heart -- Dee-Lite
Some links to get your fingers clicking and your blood pumping:

* Eggs that let you know when they're done. Hopefully, not by screaming "the boiling water! It burns!"

* Somebody uses a brick to steal from a charity. So the charity auctions the brick.

* This takes me back -- really: A proposal to reduce the 50 states of the United States to 38. Not, say, by sawing off Florida or letting California sink into the sea, but merely by changing the boundary lines. I remember first reading about this in The People's Almanac, which was published 31 years ago (the link is a reprint of that same article), so I guess we can say the idea never really caught on. But the map is fun to look at. If it had happened, I'd be living in the state of Erie now. Wild.

* Speaking of Erie (look, ma! A segue!), here's a story about the "Erie effect," in which a mirage of Canadian trees and buildings appears over the great lake, making the Great White North look 50 miles closer than it is. Apparently, it's not just the delusion of Clevelanders who have had too much to drink. Apparently it works the other direction as well.

* A parrot that not only can talk, but appears to understand works in context -- and appears to have real conversations. Mostly about how the cats are trying to kill him. Those darn cats.


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This entry has 7 comments: (Add your own)

• #7 Comment from psychfun 
  8/6/06 2:49 AM | Permalink

  Dr. Diane Pepperberg also has a Grey named Alex & she show the research where Alex can identify objects. My students watch it in the "Inside the Animal Mind" series & it is in their text.
  
  That "tatoo" on the egg will probably cause us some ailment 40 yrs from now! HA!
• #6 Comment from mavarin 
  7/31/06 11:45 PM | Permalink

  Typo - no final e on Pepperberg. Sorry.
• #5 Comment from mavarin 
  7/31/06 11:44 PM | Permalink

  Our old house on the west side of Tucson was bought by an animal research professor name Irene Pepperberge.  (She doesn't live there any more.)  She's the one who did the really important work with parrot communication in the 1990s.  I've seen footage of her asking parrots to tell the difference between a large red key and a small green key, stuff like that.  The parrot unquestionably know what it was saying. - K.
• #4 Comment from monponsett 
  7/31/06 5:36 PM | Permalink

  Mine's easy... Plymouth. Whoever carved Plymouth out of that map did a fine job in severing the upper NH/VT/western MA hicks from the system. It's basically the line between where the Boston accents end and the Maine drawl begins.
  
  Once New England is thus divided... the biggest non-Plymouth business in the former New England area would be either a ski lodge or UMass (which wouldn't be in Mass anymore, and UPlymouth would be as wrong-place-silly as "Miami of Ohio."
• #3 Comment from hewasolddog299 
  7/31/06 3:31 PM | Permalink

  Crashed the server. Bad Scalzi. Bad. ;)

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