The Albino Squirrel LIVES!

This little guy likes to hang around our house. I've been trying over a week to capture him on film. I think I'll name him Moby Dick.

Jumping Starfishes

Spotted in the campus Noon News Bulletin today:

USELESS FACT: Elephants are the only animal that can't jump.

Sorry, useless-fact-finder for the NNB, but I beg to differ. Snails cannot jump. Nor can starfish, tapeworms, or whales. Perhaps you meant elephants are the only land mammals that can't jump?

This is a Smeerp

The Turkey City Lexicon
Just to settle the matter once and for all.

Happy back to school, everybody!

Here it is, guys...

Grizelda, the podcast novel, is hitting the ether.

Check it out at www.podiobooks.com

And speaking of interesting plants...

This is called a Victoria plant. I snapped some photos of it at the botanical gardens in St. Paul. It's the hugest waterlily of all time – the one in the overhead photo is at least 10 feet across, maybe 15.

Ugly plant!

It's called a tacca chantrieri, or bat flower, native to southeast Asia. I want one.

Image from Thomson & Morgan seeds.

You know you're a scientist when...

You encounter a toy cash register at the local Target and you must drop everything to push every button on the machine, observe the little colored flags that pop up, and try to figure out whether there is any pattern to the correspondence.

Unfortunately, there isn't.

These toy manufacturers should have taken advantage of the opportunity to make the cash register an educational experience for the tykes. Say you pressed "7" and got back

[flag] [no flag] [flag]

Would it really have been so difficult to make the flags stand for the values of the numbers in binary?