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Tool Use Found in Octopuses! and pizza hut warm wishes

one of my multiple jobs includes writing, running, and upkeeping a webzine of information i care nothing about. there is a lot of space in my brain being taken up with useless real estate information, that would be much better spent memorizing my Richard III that i need to be off book for.

but the upside is that i get to crawl the internet and more often than not find wonderful new fun facts.
today's fun fact is Octopus Tool Use.

octopi are smart. this isn't really news for the science or the sci-fi community. one of my favorite sci-fi series, Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter, has a genetically bred super smart squid that flies a spaceship across the universe. as he imagined, the squid was able to learn to associate colors with certain tool use, levers and what not, that ran the ship.i think this is a fantastic idea.

 so for your learning pleasure:
In captivity, some species of octopuses have solved mazes, remembered cues and passed other cognitive tests typically associated with advanced vertebrates. More anecdotally, they’re known for popping aquarium hoods, raiding other tanks and demonstrating what might be called mischief.
All this has come as a bit of a surprise to scientists. After all, octopuses are descended from mollusks. They’re more closely related to clams than to people. They’re not supposed to be smart. But it’s hard to argue with the evidence, and in recent years, researchers have grappled with the possibility that octopuses can even use tools.
That debate has focused on octopuses seen barricading their den openings with stones. In the end, that behavior wasn’t accepted as genuine tool use, because it seemed more instinctive than calculated. (Another contested invertebrate behavior is the use of shells as homes by hermit crabs. According to the conventional wisdom, tools require direct manipulation, so the shells are no more tools than are human houses.)
Such definitions are inevitably ambiguous. But there’s no ambiguity in the veined octopuses found flushing mud from buried coconut shells, stacking them for transport — an awkward process that required the octopuses to walk on tiptoe with the upturned shells clutched beneath them — and finally turning them into hard-shelled tents.


i would be very interested in having an octopi pet, though i guess i'd have to live under water...OR maybe my super smart octopi could live in my bathtub! like this "Helping Hands" monkey the octopus could give me facials, use its suckers to pass me things, ooo! or that fancy "cupping" massage like Julia Roberts use to do! hmmm, maybe this means i need a bigger bathtub.

and for your bit o'holiday joy for the day, Pizza Hut says merry xmas

safari ngema Kayak

sitting in the grass, enjoying the view, however it is my first chance to reflect on the recent tragedy, though expected, from home. kayak, one of our families two golden retrievers, bought when we moved into pinecrest road, had to be put to sleep. i dug through my boxes and found my hard drive, expecting to find my stores of family photos. alas, it seems they all disappeared into the ether when my last computer died, leaving me one lonely picture. it is unthinkable. they must surely be hidden on a disc somewhere. the hundreds of pictures of that well loved goofball must be somewhere. i couldn't bear it otherwise.

i just read a study in the times about dogs and empathy. for centuries dogs have held a special place in peoples' hearts and lives, but now they have quantified this connection between man and beast with a simple study of yawning. it seems dogs have the ability to empathize with humans, even strangers, proven by their ability to "catch" a yawn from humans.

for me kayak and his sister cody, whose grief cannot be imagined, will always be intwined with high school and home and durham and boone and friends and long weekends without parents, and jogging through duke forest--them pulling me along, then me pulling them--and lying on the floor, cuddled in fur, held close against loneliness, in silent understanding and love as only a dog knows how. 

missed my calling?

if i could have gone around naming creatures like this, maybe i would have kept up with those science classes at Duke

 

BADASS FROG: Behold the mightiest attack frog known to man. Thank goodness it lived 65 or 70 million years ago. A U.S.-led team spent 15 years assembling a nearly complete skeleton of Beelzebufo ampinga—literally, "armored frog from hell"—a 10-pound, 16-inch beast that heaved across what is now Madagascar. Equipped with a bony head shield, big mouth and powerful jaws, researchers propose that Beelzebufo (shown here in an artist's rendering) was capable of slaying small vertebrates such as lizards and perhaps hatchling dinosaurs. In girth, the animal surpasses the 13-inch goliath frog of West Africa, the reigning heavyweight frog champ at 7 pounds, and may have been the largest frog ever. Its existence also bolsters the notion that Madagascar and South America were linked during the Cretaceous period, perhaps by Antarctica: The armored amphibian is closely related to a group of aggressive South American hoppers known as "pac-man frogs" for their large mouths, the group reports in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 

pole sane sane barney!!!

horrible news from africa.
the sweetest, biggest dog i've ever seen/met/loved was hit by a dala dala (the death traps on wheels that carry over 20 people in room for 7).

 

another dog was also hit and died on the spot, but barney is so big that the dala dala managed only to break his skull. but his poor skull is broken! i don't know how they can heal that! he is recovering at a vet, but it is impossible to say if he will live. the vets of tanzania are some of the best, so we have to keep hope. the worst is that the vet will not allow him visitors as he is afraid that it would over excite him, not even his owners, russel and kay can visit. i can't write anymore- i can't bare to eulogize him.

 

after i saved him from being washed away. i'd like to think he loved me for this and not for the raw eggs, avocado, and ginger cookies, among other things, he could get from me when ever he showed up for affection.