Deep Sea News: colossal squid vs. giant squid

Craig at Deep Sea News talks about the two squid being dissected in New Zealand.:

To bring you up to speed, a crack team of teuthologists* dissected both Giant and Colossal Squids at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand last week. This is where the confusion arises as a Giant Squid AND 2 Colossal Squid were dissected. One of these was the 495kg giant caught over a year ago by fisherman in the Antarctic (oh yeah…she’s a girl!). Seeing the media consistently confuse the two species greatly saddens me. But hey if the media always got it right there would be little need for DSN.

So for clarity the Giant Squid and the Colossal Squid are completely different. Below I provide a list that you can print out and keep in your wallet or purse along with your Seafood Watch card….

Read more.

The colossal squid is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni and the giant squid is Architeuthis.

Where do monorail cats come from?

Training ground….

moar funny pictures

WordPress April wrap-up

WordPress has published some statistics for April:

• 240,494 blogs were created.
• 281,729 new users joined.
• 2,533,704 file uploads. (Y’all use the new uploader a lot more.)
• About 740 gigabytes of new files. (Estimated, better number next month.)
• 317 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters. (Compare to last time we published transfer numbers.)
• 3,258,032 posts and 1,330,355 new pages.
• 5,775,721 comments.
• 4,903,485 logins.
• 655,178,604 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 408,359,440 on self-hosted blogs. (1,063,538,044 pageviews total across blogs using our stats system. We broke a billion!!)
• 63,730,680 pageviews in RSS feeds.
• 884,208 active blogs, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 152,005,525 unique people visited WordPress.com-hosted blogs.

Random facts:

• About 30% of pageviews go to blogs with their own domains.
• 43% of pageviews to permalink pages.
• 30% of pageviews go to blogs in languages other than English. The most popular? Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian.
• 63% of our visitors were from outside of the United States.
• About 93% of pageviews were to people not logged in.
• People logged in somewhere using OpenID 84 thousand times.
• Blogs using the Digg3 theme got 5.26% of total traffic.
• There were 475 posts made via the Atom API (234,831 with XML-RPC).
• We sent 3,761,059 emails.

So many of our stats fall along 70/30 lines it’s scary.

Techskeptic’s autism post

Techskeptic has taken on the task of debunking some of the commoner myths about the causes of autism. Here’s just one in a whole series of points:

Claim: Mercury in Thimerisol causes autism
Evidence: We have been vaccinating more people and the rate of autism has been rising.
Debunking: Here is a study that tries to make this very claim. But that data in the study conflicts with its own conclusions. It shows the rise in autism rates, but sadly for him, and David Kirby the head of the mercury militia, thimerisol is no longer added to vaccines in the US as of late 2002. Its now 2008 and the rates continue to rise in california, and in the entire US, without even a blip in the rate when the thimerisol was removed.

This is not surprising, Canada performed the very same study in 1998 with 27,000 kids in it, same result.

If you take out the thing they claimed to be causing autism and the rates continue to rise, then it wasnt that thing.

Read the rest.

Adobe vs. Apple for Flash

Mike Cane 2008 points out the significance of Adobe’s decision to cancel licensing fees on its Flash technology: “Now we know why Apple rejected Flash.” They are hoping to prevent a repeat of the TrueType debacle. Here’s the announcement:

Adobe seeks to extend reach of Flash, nukes licensing fees

Adobe has announced a new initiative called Open Screen, which aims to make the company’s Flash multimedia technology ubiquitous on mobile and embedded devices. Adobe plans to eliminate the licensing fees required to distribute its own Flash player and AIR runtime implementations on mobile devices and will also remove licensing restrictions on the specifications for the FLV and SWF formats so that developers can create fully-compatible independent Flash player implementations.

Read Mike’s article for an explanation.

U.S. National Day of Prayer

Last week, May 1st, was the U.S. day for marginalizing their non-Christian citizens at taxpayer expense. Our witty one with a word, Digital Cuttlefish, has written a poem for the occasion and several commenters have chimed in.

It’s time to raise our voice in prayer,
And pray to–well, there’s no one there.
No god to urge to do our bidding;
Go on and pray–just know you’re kidding.

It’s time to all sit on our asses,
And pray forgiveness for trespasses
(Or is that to forgive our debtor?
Who cares, as long as we feel better.) …

There’s more here. And our dear Cuttle has some links to news and commentary around the U.S. about the Day of Prayer.