Dork Scratchings

Hobbit hole, Chalkney Woods (Homunculum cuniculum) Stinkhorn, Sandringham (Phallus Impudicus) Wild dog with pliosauroid fossil, Sandringham (Canis Poodiculous)

I'm old enough to remember when holograms first appeared commercially.  I remember being amazed and trying to look behind to see if it wasn't just a 3-dimensional object masquerading as a 2-dimensional object (masquerading as a 3-dimensional object).  It must have looked like when you show a chimp a mirror and it tries to reach behind it to touch its reflection.  (I guess the same would happen to a human if it saw a mirror for the first time as an adult.) I did one year of physics at university before switching to maths.  In general I didn't like the practical sessions because they were always at the end of the day, and very long and tiring.  However, on one occasion we got to make our own holograms, and that really did impress me.  IIRC mine was of a 2 pence piece. What I found really interesting, was finding out how they worked.  I don't think we were taught this as such - it was up to us whether we wanted to go off and find out for o...

From: Learn To Speak Mafia About 15 years ago I was working for a small firm making telecoms equipment , and developing from scratch a Voice over IP box.  It was a very simple device to convert SIP internet calls to local analogue POTS lines (Plain Old Telephony Service) and there were just two of us working on the project: Mike the hardware engineer, and me, for the software. The box had a microprocessor running Linux (including a massively hacked version of Linphone for the SIP stack), and it had a DSP to support the codecs (short for Codify/Decodify).  It was quite a fun project (*) . A word about codecs and SIP:  SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol (**) and is an internet standard allowing two internet peers to start a phone call.  One of the main tasks SIP has to perform is to co-ordinate on which codec to use.  One peer may support GSM, G.729, and G.711, and another may support G.726, GSM, and Speex - in which case the two peers would have ...

Curiously, I think the answer is that human males are generally monogamous. Before getting on to that we should ask: what is the excess adipose tissue carried by females of the human species actually for?  There are two naive answers which I've heard expressed in the past: To provide milk for the human infant To attract a mate Neither of these explanations hold water.  Every other mammal that I'm aware of only has swollen glands whilst the offspring are young enough to breastfeed. At all other times the females look more or less similar to the males.  The second explanation leaves open an obvious question too.    Why should a male be attracted to these things in the first place? What does seem to be true, is that - all other things being equal - possession of the aforesaid is an encumbrance, as any well-endowed cave-woman that has ever tried to flee a sabre-toothed tiger might attest. There are cases in nature, however, where encumbrances are car...