Isotropic

A few days ago iGoogle linked to an old photo of the lengthly (full letter-size page) instructions someone had taped to an office vending machine. I wanted to reference it here because it was quite funny, but unfortunately I’ve wiped out my browsing history since then and can’t find it, even after an [...]

According to Hannah Hickey, in Underwater communication: Robofish are the ultimate in ocean robots, keeping in touch without scientists’ help (University of Washington), “The Robofish pack’s first assignment, beginning this summer, will be to trail a remote-controlled toy shark.”.
Robofish are unique in that that they can coordinate their activities and, due to underwater inter-communication, [...]

You know you’re having a bad day when…
Good: Let’s go SCUBA diving!
Bad: Yikes, we’ve been swept into shark-infested waters!
Good: Hey, an island …
Bad: … infested with Komodo Dragons!
The full story is here.
h/t: Greg Ladenimage: Markofjohnson, KomodoDragonRinca1.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

I’m always inordinately delighted by interesting phrases (Ooh, shiny!). So much so that I’ll make a post just so I can reference the phrases. That isn’t to say that the posts I link to aren’t interesting in themselves — I didn’t find them while actually looking for quotes, after all. I’m [...]

According to this BBC News article, “An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan’s Narita airport has received 142g of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.”. Against regulations, an agent hid the training sample in a real passenger’s bag rather than a training bag. Apparently he has been doing this regularly.
Imagine [...]

Language Log’s ongoing ridicule of the BBC’s science reporting continues with Parrots and children: still silly season at the BBC:

There are people writing purportedly serious stories for the British Broadcasting Corporation who think that a grey parrot has the cognitive ability of a normal six year old human child. Have these people never met [...]

Alexandra von Feldmann calls it the Birth Clock, an “Electronic Clock that helps you to make up your mind” when you’re stuck at a major decision point in your life.
A glass object containing a non-running digital clock — fragile, beautiful, timeless.
Break it — amid the shards of your irreversible decision, the clock starts running.
I [...]

According to Alison Abbott in Swiss ‘dignity’ law is threat to plant biology (Nature News), “The Swiss federal government’s ethics committee on non-human biotechnology has mapped out guidelines to help granting agencies decide which research applications deeply offend the dignity of plants — and hence become unfundable.”
Maybe I need to rethink my Grumpy Flowers [...]

zogger, in Sky Spam, at Technocrat, says
Most of us have probably seen skywriting, but a new company has a twist to it, man made clouds in the form of corporate advertising that can look just like the logos. The “flogos” are made from a chemical surfactant and helium and can last for up to [...]

It’s time to reassemble the interocitor and send “I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords“, if I can just find the schematics. Oh, wait….
It’s too late, baby, according to Dr. Alexander L. Zaitsev’s Detection Probability of Terrestrial Radio Signals by a Hostile Super-civilization. We don’t need to worry about the dangers [...]