Q: Would you send me the lyrics to my favorite song?
A: No. We don’t have any more access to real lyrics than you do, and even if we did, we wouldn’t spend all day doing free research for the general public. There are many sites on the Web that archive real lyrics, and you should look to them, not this one, for that service. Google knows all. In addition, we have a discussion board here on the site, which is a great place to ask other lyrics fans about real lyrics.
The kind of mail I get from users several times a week anyway:
Hello – Please me to send lyrics(texst) from Hungarien group ‘Omega’ from album ‘Gammapolis’ song ‘Lady Of The Summer Night’ original english text version. Thank you too. My best Wishes.
New studies from South Africa call the legendary intelligence of dolphins into question, concluding that whales and dolphins may actually possess no more smarts than goldfish. The fact that they have complex social behaviors may be a red herring, which we mis-identify as intelligence. Chicago Sun-Times:
Yet while dolphins aren’t as smart as people tend to think, they are as happy as they seem. Manger said dolphins have a ”huge amount” of serotonin in their brains, which is what he described as ”the happy drug.”
Not sure I’m buying it. You can’t teach a goldfish basic vocal communications with humans. Goldfish don’t try to save the lives of drowning sailors. Goldfish can’t balance balls on their snouts or plant mines on the sides of ships (granted, goldfish don’t posses the physical attributes to accomplish any of these feats, so it’s not exactly a fair comparison).
The Sun Times article is sourced from the Scripps-Howard News Service, and is short on details. I wasn’t able to turn up corroborating stories easily.
Q: What’s better than reading Dr. Seuss with Daddy?
A: Having a disembodied stranger read Dr. Seuss to you through your Windows-only, proprietary FP3 DRM format Fisher-Price FP3 Player (blue for boys, pink for girls!).
Think of it as training wheels for the children of iPod-toting parents. Oh, wait, I’m one of those. So why isn’t thing appealing? Maybe because I can’t picture a situation where Miles would be walking around with headphones on not talking to anyone — it’s not like he’s got the morning commute to himself. Maybe because we don’t have any Windows machines in our house. Maybe because the world is already drowning in DRM?
Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh, too hypocritical. I get to enjoy my socially insulating technology. I cave in and buy DRM’d music from iTMS. Why shouldn’t he? Maybe it’s because this thing smells like My First Sony, the name of which made the whole line seem like a bald-faced attempt to get the Sony brand needle under the skin of pre-schoolers before their impressionable young minds were infected by rival logos. Smelled like it because it was.
Out on the back deck, heard some scurrying. “Damn raccoons,” I thought, watching a tail slip under the deck. Grabbed the hose and started squirting. Then heard one growling a low, plaintive growl. Peered over the side to find an adult raccoon facing off with me, totally defiant. Couldn’t believe it could be so ballsy, but gave it a good squirt. It ducked underneath, then emerged like a mother duck trailing four painfully adorable baby raccoons behind. She led them out through a hole in the fence and down the street and suddenly I felt guilty. I’m thinking “pest control” and she’s thinking “must protect my family.” As much as I don’t want a family of raccoons growing up below our feet, it was amazing how profoundly their cuteness affected me, as if they were somehow inherently innocent of vermin-hood.
What is it with this neighborhood? We live on a fairly busy street, just a few blocks from one of the East Bay’s main arteries, but we see deer all the time, strolling down the middle of the street like they own the place* (and we’re engaged in ongoing battle with their garden-consuming habits). The other night we heard a blood-curtling racket and came out to find a pair of adult owls mating (in plain view – shocking!) on the branch of a tree just a few feet above our heads. You’d think we lived in the middle of the 100-Acre Wood.
When I was young, Dad used to tell the story of the first time he crossed the International Date Line with the Coast Guard, aboard the U.S.S. Chautauqua. Sailors who had never crossed before were called “pollywogs” and had to go through what amounts to a hazing ritual, though they didn’t call it that.
Pollywogs would have to climb through a bag of ship’s garbage, have their faces pushed into another man’s belly covered in used motor oil from the engine room, get sprayed with fire hoses while trying to retrieve their clothes, and become the slave of a “shellback” for a day (a shellback being a sailor who had crossed the IDL before). Officers were not exempt.
Dad and I recently had hours of old 8mm and Super8 family film digitized, and have been working on a DVD, preserving a bunch of family footage before the film completely rots. Amazingly, he had an 8mm camera on board with him during a 1957 crossing, and shot several minutes of footage. Decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with YouTube, and loaded up the clip.
The military has cracked down on hazing rituals quite a bit over the decades; I wonder how much of this kind of thing still goes on.
Note: This clip was hosted on YouTube for more than a year, then was mysteriously removed from the service for “Terms of Service” violation. I was never informed about the removal, and all attempts to reach YouTube for an explanation went unanswered. Since there is positively no copyright violation involved in the clip, I have to assume that it was removed after complaints from one or more viewers. My suspicion is that complaints may have come from military personnel not wanting to see the Coast Guard shown in a bad light; but that’s conjecture. Let’s hope it has better luck on Vimeo.
The U.S. Navy estimates that it spends around $50 million/year in additional fuel costs due to drag caused by bio-fouling — the attachment of algae, barnacles, and undersea flora to ships’ hulls. It’s a problem that has bedeviled sailors since boats were invented. I once made a pretty OK living doing underwater boat cleaning for local boat owners (high school days).
Funny thing: Whales get barnacles just like boats — but sharks don’t. A microscopic look at shark skin reveals a pattern of tiny rectangles arranged in geometric patterns, each topped with pointy bristles. The surface of a shark is very difficult for organisms to get a grip on. Since the organisms don’t have much time to live, they quickly move on, rather than wrestle with the texture.
Now researchers have found a way to replicate the texture of shark skin in great plastic sheets, which can be applied to ships’ hulls much like those big ads that cover entire buses. Not only do you get huge gains in fuel efficiency, but there’s a big enviro upside as well, as marine paint designed to minimize bio-fouling is full of copper, which sloughs off and sinks to the bottom of the sea. Everyone wins.
My brother-in-law is a philosophy professor, and while in Minnesota recently, I had the opportunity to attend one of his ethics classes. The subject of the week was abortion, and much of the discussion hinged on the difficulty of establishing person-hood. There are philosophers who believe person-hood rests on criteria such as self-awareness, conscientiousness, determination, etc. Other philosophers believe these criteria are ultimately problematic, and that we require a more biological definition — that person = human being, where “human being” is defined by criteria such as being bipedal, possessing a neural network, (and to distinguish us from other animals) unable to fly unassisted, unable to echolocate…
It’s that last criteria — echolocation — I was thinking about while reading the story of Ben Underwood, a boy who lost his sight to cancer at age 3 and instinctively taught himself to emit a series of clicking noises with his tongue and gauge the distance to things by listening for the echoes. But Underwood doesn’t just gauge distances — he can tell what materials things are made of, how they move through space, where they land when they fall. Though he is blind, Underwood skateboards with his friends, plays basketball, and refuses to walk with a cane. And he’s already been offered a job as a dolphin trainer.
Of course no one would say Underwood is not a person, but it’s amusing when we create seemingly universal descriptions such as “A person is a being that cannot echolocate” … and then nature proves us wrong.
Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. Mini poll:
There is a (minor) point to this poll, but I want to collect some data first. And no, this doesn’t mean I missed a meeting (it’s not even work related).
From events with top Democratic Party officials, to campaign trips across the country, to weekly policy discussions, the Harvard Dems is the place to turn for political dialogue on campus.
