One way to stop poaching of rare animals

Shoot the poachers.  Outside explains how one national park in India has protected its tigers and rhinos:

Pegu was ready. He came upon a mother rhino feeding with her calf. Got out his rifle. Shooting a rhino is like shooting a barn: when you take aim, they stop and stare, deciding whether to charge. Pegu shot the mother dead, hacked off her horn, and left the baby standing there...

As soon as he fired, [park rangers] closed on the spot. Unlike most guards in most parks in India, they were armed. And they had license to kill.

Pegu saw the guards first and opened fire. Missed. The guards took cover. As the shooting continued, one guard calmly raised his antique .303 Lee Enfield rifle to his shoulder, lined up Pegu in his sights, and blew his head off.

Pegu’s accomplice was shot in the hip by another guard. An hour later, he, too, had died “from his injuries,” according to the park’s report...

I try to envision a ranger in the U.S. ­doing the same. But nothing in Kaziranga is like anything in the U.S. There’s the super­dense concentration of tigers, rhinos, and ­ele­phants—and the fact that they’re thriving. The sheer value of that wildlife on the black market. The grinding poverty of the ­surrounding ­villages. And the tsunami of money and ­demand pouring out of China...

Kaziranga has about 100 of Asia’s remaining 2,000 Bengal ­tigers, the highest density of any park in the world. Its tiger population continues to ­increase—in sharp contrast to the rest of ­India, where poaching has reduced ­Bengal ­tiger numbers from 3,600 in the 1990s to about 1,700 today. In China, a ­tiger skin can fetch $20,000, and a large rhino horn will set you back about $37,000...

The guards receive a tiny stipend, a camp to live in, a uniform, a gun, and a few bullets. That’s it. They have to provide their own food and communication device. They have no way of leaving their camps unless they radio for a jeep pickup—not a big problem, since they rarely get a day off to see their families anyway. The chronically strapped Forest Depart­ment sometimes goes months without paying them; it hasn’t had the money to hire new guards in 20 years, so there are a hundred unfilled ­positions, and the existing guards are stretched too thin...

Shooting poachers? A no-brainer. Accord­ing to Unesco, nine to twelve poachers are shot in Kaziranga each year, and 50 were killed in the nineties alone. Has it worked? Since the peak in 1992, when 48 rhinos were poached, the past decade has averaged fewer than ten poachings per year. In 2010, only five rhinos were shot in Kaziranga, while nine poachers were killed, the first time poacher deaths surpassed rhinos...

Much more at the long link about this very complicated environmental and social issue.

Via Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Addendum: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that another park in India is employing similar tactics - this time with armed commandos rather than impoverished park rangers:

Armed commandos are to be deployed in the jungles of southern India to deter poachers from capturing and killing endangered tigers. The 54-strong Special Tiger Protection Force will patrol the two main tiger reserves of Bandipur and Nagarhole national parks on the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu state border...

760-705-8888 is the Google Chat number

I signed up for Google Chat this weekend and gave it a try as a substitute for Skype to call my cousin in Barcelona.  Couldn't get the video part to work right, but the audio was excellent.  The number that displays on the recipient's phone is 760-705-8888.  I found a discussion of the reasons for this (and some pros and cons) at this link.

Double-necked bowl (Peru, 15th century)

From the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The shallow, slightly incurved bowl sits on three short supports; it has a smaller bowl inside. Two long-necked animals, a llama and a bird, are attached on one side and connected to the inner and outer bowls respectively; they serve as pouring spouts. The slender, spotted body of a third animal, probably a feline, is draped over part of the top of the larger bowl, its paws gripping the rim. The vessel is slip-painted in black and red over buff; around the outer wall is a segmented band depicting insects.

The vessel probably served as a paccha, or ceremonial vessel used for pouring libations such as chicha (maize beer) on the earth to ensure fertility and growth of plentiful crops...

Via A London Salmagundi.

Professional shoplifter

YouTube link. 

Shoplifts a case of 24 Guinness!  This is no spur-of-the-moment theft; she's clearly an experienced (and skillful) thief.  If she can do this with a load that large and awkward, imagine how many smaller items she must have successfully lifted in the past.  It must be hard to be a retail merchant and have to deal with activity like this on a regular basis.

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

Macmillan Love English Awards

From the publishers of the Macmillan dictionary:

Which website and which blog deserves a community-chosen award for being the best blog or best website about the English language in 2011?

Where do you go to when you need information, inspiration, guidance or resources in your desire to learn more about English or to satisfy your curiosity about the language? Who do you love, who do you trust, and who do you recommend to your friends or colleagues?

This is your chance to show your appreciation by nominating and voting for your favourite websites and blogs to recognise their contribution over the last year so that they can open the New Year with a badge of honour awarded by you.

The list of about 35 current nominees for the best blog about the English language includes five that I regularly monitor for TYWKIWDBI, but I found several others that are interesting.  It's a list worth exploring.

Addendum:  The above link died with the end of the competition, but the award winners are listed in Macmillan's blog.

A "reflection rainbow" - not a double rainbow

I have seen innumerable rainbows in my life, but have never seen this phenomenon. 

Phil Thompson was walking along a jetty at the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, Australia, when he spotted a rainbow reflecting off the sea to create two visible arcs of colour emanating from the same spot.

In the traditional double rainbow, the two arc would have he same radius of curvature.  The reflection phenomenon is explained at Wikipedia:

Where sunlight reflects off a body of water before reaching the raindrops (see diagram), it may produce a reflection rainbow (see photo at the right), if the water body is large, quiet over its entire surface, and close to the rain curtain. The reflection rainbow appears above the horizon. It intersects the normal rainbow at the horizon, and its arc reaches higher in the sky, with its centre as high above the horizon as the normal rainbow's centre is below it. Due to the combination of requirements, a reflection rainbow is rarely visible.

Six (or even eight) bows may be distinguished if the reflection of the reflection bow, and the secondary bow with its reflections happen to appear simultaneously [example below, from Norway, posted at APOD]:

Top photo: Phil Thompson / SWNS.com, via The Telegraph.  Lower photo: Terje O. Nordvik.

Plunging Latin American fertility rates

The graph above is really startling, and very important re future environmental, social, political and economic conditions.  Here are some excerpts from the Washington Post article:

Fertility rates have dropped in many parts of the world in recent decades, but something particularly remarkable happened to the once-prolific family across Latin America. From sprawling Mexico to tiny Ecuador to economically buoyant Chile, fertility rates plummeted, even though abortion is illegal, the Catholic Church opposes birth control and government-run family planning is rare...

In 1960, women in Latin America had almost six children on average. By 2010, the rate had fallen to 2.3 children...

Demographers were astonished that Brazil’s fertility rate fell almost uniformly from cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, with its tiny apartments and go-go economy, to Amazonian villages and the vast central farming belt.

“Brazil started coming down and had this big drop that amazed everybody, everywhere,” said Suzana Cavenaghi, a Brazilian census bureau demographer. “We wouldn’t expect that in a country that’s so diverse, with a lot of poverty in so many places and so unequal, economically speaking.”..

“Women nowadays, they understand that they have to change their lives,” said Veronica Marques, communications director for Elas, a group that helps women start businesses across Brazil. “This idea of doing what she really wants to do, and having the power to do it, is the thing that has changed this country.”..

The lives of Brazil’s career women are often reflected in the country’s elaborate soaps, or telenovelas, which numerous U.S. and Brazilian researchers say have been an important factor in the drop in Brazilian fertility. The protagonists may be perpetually anguished about lost love, but they inhabit an appealing, affluent, highflying world, whose distinguishing features include the small family.

Other factors contributing to the change are discussed in the Washington Post article.

11-year-old chickadee

"I think it has a lot of luck and a lot of skill," said Michael North, a veteran licensed bird bander who captured the aged but still frisky bird in a large net near his home east of Pillager, in central Minnesota, twice this month. "It's probably a dominant bird, and is getting access to the best resources. It's a numbers game, too. Just by chance some birds are going to live longer than others."

Thursday was the sixth time North has held the same bird since he first placed a small ID band on its leg in May 2002, when he estimated it was two years old. He hadn't seen it since January 2010, nearly two years ago, but when it showed up this month, it had outlived the previously-oldest black-capped chickadee in U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) records. That bird was last seen in Massachusetts in 1980, when it was 11 years and two months old. The Pillager chickadee was, as of Thursday, 11 years and six months old.

Additional details at the StarTribune.  I frankly had no idea these little birds lived that long.  You learn something every day.


Photo credit Michael North.

First World problem

Posted for a family member who can relate to this.  I find the "first world problem" meme particularly interesting.

Why snow looks white

From Scientific American:

When we look at freshly fallen snow, we see it as white. This is because sunlight traveling to and through the airy snow is made up of all of the colors in the visible spectrum of light. This light is scattered and reflected through the many snow crystals and flakes. The hexagonal bases of snow crystals act like thousands of prisms lying on the ground, refracting and reflecting all of the colors of the visible light. In most cases, no wavelengths or colors of light are absorbed by the snow and nearly all of the light is reflected back towards our eyes which interpret all of these reflected wavelengths together as the color white.

A knitted "brain hat" and a "skull cup"

A skillfully done depiction of the gyri and sulci of the human brain.  Via BoingBoing, where there is also a link to a "Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art."

For comparison/contrast, here is a human skull that has been carved into a decorative bowl:

A kapala (Sanskrit for “skull”) is a cup made from a human skull used as a ritual implement (bowl) in both Hindu Tantra and Buddhist Tantra (Vajrayana). Especially in Tibet, they were often carved or elaborately mounted with precious metals and jewels.

Other examples are shown at Oddity Central, via Criminal Wisdom.

Incredible touchdown

YouTube link. 

If you're not totally sated with football, take a peek at this brief clip (soon, because  most NFL videos are pulled quickly).

How to survive if you're placed in a blender

The Wall Street Journal provided several answers to that dilemna in an article entitled "How to Ace a Google Interview."

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

These questions, posted by job candidates on Glassdoor.com, aren't from some wacky Silicon Valley start-up—they're asked of applicants at AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and Bank of America, respectively.

Goldman Sachs interviewers ask candidates the firm's stock price. Morgan Stanley asks interviewees to name a recent story they've read in the Financial Times—apparently, a lot can't. J.P. Morgan Chase asks the value of pi. (It's thought to be instructive to see how many digits the candidate can recite.)

Here are two additional, more standard math-type interview questions reportedly used at Google interviews -

3. Using only a four-minute hourglass and a seven-minute hourglass, measure exactly nine minutes—without the process taking longer than nine minutes.  
 
4. A book has N pages, numbered the usual way, from 1 to N. The total number of digits in the page numbers is 1,095. How many pages does the book have?

Answers to these and the blender question at the link.

Addendum: A hat tip to an anonymous reader who found an article written by someone with personal experience on a Google hiring committee.  The story that Google uses lateral thinking questions in their interview process is an urban legend (though other companies may do so).  Details at the link.

World's largest caganer in Barcelona

Those unfamiliar with caganers can read about the Catalonian tradition in Wikipedia.   This six-meter-high one is claimed to be the world's largest.  A gallery of standard-sized caganers representing Michael Jackson, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and others was posted last year, and I posted the Obama one three years ago.

 Photo credit Toni Garriga / EPA, via MSN.

Good fences make good neighbors

A clever idea for adding color and sparkle to a drab, sun-bleached fence:

I would recommend using new marbles. Vintage marbles will vary in size, slightly, so if you can deal with this, go ahead. So first, find your marbles if you’ve lost them, then determine a drill bit size that will bore a hole, ever so slightly smaller than your marble. You want it to press in snugly to help it stay put. No adhesive needed. I advise drilling test holes in scrap wood to help you get the right sized holes made. You may need to purchase a special sized bit.

I lose a marble or two over the winter from the wood contracting and expanding and maybe a couple over the summer, but a little vigilance, popping them back in is all that’s needed.

Further details at Garden Drama, via Neatorama.