Month: January 2009

Seal finds trout buffet at hatchery

Like a chocoholic with keys to a Godiva shop, a young harbor seal found herself in sea mammal heaven yesterday — the Sandwich Hatchery.(Ironic name)

And before she was captured and released on a salt water beach, the little seal managed to munch on untold numbers of four-pound trout.No one is quite sure exactly how the seal ended up at the state fish hatchery.

She had to travel about two miles from the area of the Sandwich Boardwalk on Cape Cod Bay, follow a creek that passes under a mini-golf course and Route 6A and runs through a wooded area skirting the fish hatchery, before somehow making her way to the hatchery lagoons. With several fish-filled lagoons to choose from, the little seal ended up in the one with the largest trout, most weighing four pounds or so. Click link for video

via CapeCodTimes.com – Seal finds trout buffet at Sandwich hatchery.

Blame HGTV for the Real Estate Crash

HGTV is an evil empire that never rests. You can loathe your current domicile 24/7 with programs such as “Stagers” (move a few things around and double the value of your home); “Designed to Sell” (you can sell your house, even if the house next to yours is in foreclosure); “Design on a Dime” (see, it’s cheap); and “Property Virgins” (losing your virginity was fun, wasn’t it?) Every show features highly attractive hosts who show you how to “unlock the hidden potential” in your home, how to turn a $10 thrift-store table into a “wow” media center, and how to make everything “pop.” Pop is the word of choice on HGTV.

Ironic, isn’t it, given the fact that pop is the sound we keep hearing from the McMansion-sized housing bubble HGTV created.

via Jim Sollisch: Blame Television for the Bubble – WSJ.com. Continue reading “Blame HGTV for the Real Estate Crash”

Study Questions “Free Will”

They asked 14 subjects to lie in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which allowed the researchers to track more brain regions for longer than Libet had. They instructed the subjects to decide spontaneously whether to press a button on the right or one on the left. The volunteers could decide at their own pace, but they had to report the moment of the conscious choice based on a clocklike device in the scanner.

The researchers scoured the brain for changes that correlated with the final decision. The earliest brain pattern that coded for a left or right choice was in the frontopolar cortex, right behind the forehead. The pattern predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience. “We weren’t expecting this kind of lead time,” Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren’t perfect, “there’s not very much space for operation of free will,” Haynes says. “The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision.” Haynes says the group hopes to extend the work to more realistic choices such as what to drink or what game to watch

via Case Closed for Free Will? — Youngsteadt 2008 (414): 3 — ScienceNOW.

A Year Of Seasons In 40 seconds

Norwegian photographer Erik Solheim aimed his camera at the same spot in his backyard and took a picture every day for a year. This is the video of them all stiched together. How he did it and a link to an High Definition version at this link below to his web-site. eirikso.com.