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Year: 2007 (Page 8 of 11)

Pride of Lions has a Bad Day

Here is one of the most amazing videos I have ever seen. It’s eight minutes long but it’s well worth watching the whole thing. There are several different events that take place throughout the video that will astound you. Any one of those events would make a stunning video clip by itself. A pride of lions, a herd of cape buffalo, and two big crocodiles get into a rumble, and you’ll see who’s boss. The lions are young and foolish, and have not yet learned to respect the cape buffalo. But they learn.

I learned 30 years ago from a very good friend who was a lifelong African big game hunter that the lion has the reputation but the real king of the hill in Africa is not the lion, it is the cape buffalo. My friend spent several months every year in Africa, for 40 years, hunting. He taught me that lions have the reputation of being a predator with no natural enemies–top of the food chain. Not true, he told me that while they are at the top of the food chain they definitely have a natural enemy. He said that herds of cape buffalo will hunt lions–not to eat them but simply to kill them and rid themselves of a pest. According to him, cape buffalo will raid dens of lions in an organized fashion and kill every one they can get. Groups of buffalo will locate and set up ambushes on each of the escape routes from the den, and then another group will attack the den in a frontal assault. The lions scatter only to run straight into buffalo that are waiting for them. The attack group then goes in and kills all the cubs. So the cape buffalo know all about lions. In this video you will see behaviors that I’m sure you’ve never seen before. Just one cape buffalo is a very dangerous animal, but as you will see they can also act in concert. Talk about scary.

It’s easy to lose your sense of scale in this video. Remember that cape buffalo are enormous creatures, weighing over a ton, and the lions are 400 pounds or more. One of the lions discovers just how strong a cape buffalo is, the hard way. Ouch!

Prepare to be amazed again and again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

Food is Not What it Used to Be

Over the past 50 years, iron levels in meat have dropped from 47 to 80 percent. Iron levels in milk have dropped by 60 percent! No, this is not a joke and I’m not making this up. The AAAS (American Associate for the Advancement of Science) held a symposium on this problem not long ago.

Our high-tech farming with fertilizers, chemicals, etc. will make crops grow fast and look good but it’s “all show and no go”, as we used to say in the car racing biz. High-yield crops grow faster and bigger but fail to accumulate the nutrients we need. Nutrient levels in fruits, vegetables, and wheat have declined dramatically over the past 50 years. The concentration of some vitamins, minerals, and protein, including calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and ascorbic acid have dropped by from 5 to 38 percent.

And get this, especially you women, the iron in 15 varieties of meat decreased an average of 47 percent. Some meat products fell as much as 80 percent.

Copper has fallen by 60 percent, magnesium by 10 percent. Both copper and magnesium are essential for enzyme functioning.

Here’s a link to get you started for info:
http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/04newsreleases/nr_200412/nr_chemistry041201.html

My Ideal Notebook Computer

Back around 1992 there was a notebook computer called the Panasonic Business Partner P-180. It was a lightweight, rugged, clamshell notebook computer with a nearly full sized keyboard that you could type on all day, a 9 or 10-inch monochrome LCD display with no backlight that was very readable in ambient light and sunlight, a single 720k floppy, and a small 12 volt gel cell battery that ran the machine for 8 hours. The CPU was a CMOS 80C88, OS was DOS 3.1 and it was an outstanding “text mill”. With a Wordstar clone and a PIM called Tornado installed, I had everything I needed. I could sit at a picnic table and bang out text documents all day long, make and refer to notes instantly. It was silent, no fan, no hard disk, no heat, and the keyboard was quiet, perfect for taking notes at a meeting or in college. It had an external 12V power input so if I brought along a little 4 Ah gel cell (size of a soda can), I could run for 30 or 40 hours without recharging. Today I wish I still had that machine.

Fast forward to 2007 and there is NOTHING like this machine on the market. We have battery technology today that is light years better than gel cells but every single notebook computer made is jammed with power hungry devices that give a battery life of 2 to 3 hours, which is FAR less than acceptable. With today’s technology one could design a machine just like the P-180 with a transflective display and a backlight that can be turned off and only used in darkness. Replace the 720k floppy with a pair of 2 GB SD memory card slots (giving 2,500 times the memory capacity of the old Panasonic). VIA makes an x86 CPU that runs on about 1 watt of power. Add WiFi that can be powered down when not in use. Perhaps add a USB port or two. Run Linux on it, and you’ve got it made. There’s plenty of memory to install Linux, Firefox, and Open Office and have 3 gigabytes left over.

This would be the ultimate machine for students taking notes in classes. They could run all day and into the night without recharging. Use it in the library for research without constantly worrying about running the battery down. Relax, use it all you want. Set it on your lap and not burn your legs from the heat since there IS no heat. It would also be excellent for news reporters / journalists in the field, just like the old Tandy Model 100 once was. It would be great for authors, lawyers, or anyone who would like to sit under a tree and write all day without the least concern about using up that precious little 3 hours of battery life, and it would be rugged since there is no delicate hard disk to worry about. In fact, this machine has no moving parts at all except for the keyboard contacts. It would be ideal for travelers and backpackers since it would be lighter than an average notebook and far more rugged. World travellers / backpackers / sailors use their machines mainly to compose and post blog entries and to do email. This machine can do that, much more, and run for 25 hours on a battery charge.

If I were designing this machine I would make the battery pack easily replaced so one could have two packs–one charging while the other is in use. Come home at night, swap battery packs, and you’re ready for another day. If this machine could be powered and charged directly from a 12V automobile cigarette lighter it would be fantastic.

And a machine like this can retail for $300. Why doesn’t it exist? I don’t need this machine to store 8,000 mp3 files, and six episodes of “Lost”, and play the latest video games because I don’t use it for listening to music or watching video. I have other machines for that. I would use this little machine for practical work: referring to and making notes, and writing. Isn’t this what people do all day in school and in meetings? Yes it is! And the machine I describe supports a browser and WiFi so web research can be done and one has access to things like Google docs and so forth when connected to the net.

Such a machine would be simple and straightforward to design, yet year after year I wait for a machine like this to come along and it never does. What’s more, I run into applications that other people have, situations that are described to me where this machine would be the perfect solution, so I know there is a market for it. I recently became friends with a well-known columnist at eWeek magazine because his “holy grail” machine is very much like what I describe here, but there’s nothing out there in the marketplace. We had hopes for the Palm Foleo but the project was canceled a couple days ago. Just this evening I spoke with a friend who is traveling in Vietnam and this machine would be ideal for him.

Are any of the manufacturers listening? Do they do any market research? Do they realize that not everybody wants a power-sucking super wowee-zowee dual-core turbocharged racing laptop that leaves second-degree burns on their legs if they use it as a laptop? All I want to do is type some text and do an email okay? That’s it. A Celeron 433 from 1999 is plenty of compute power for this machine.

I am just astounded that nobody makes a machine like this. It would sell like crazy to the right audience.

NOTE: (Added April 15, 2008) I wrote a follow on blog entry to this post that discusses the new Asus Eee:
http://shuttersparks.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-ideal-notebook-computer-part-ii.html

shuttersparks

Americans are Getting Shorter

Average height of a population is related to health and quality of diet. This has been known for a long time. In colonial times, Americans were the tallest people in the world. When traveling in Europe, Americans were accustomed to towering over the rest of the crowd. This makes sense because the average American had a healthier lifestyle, healthier environment, and better diet than his European counterpart. But that’s all changed over the last 50 years. Americans are becoming shorter (and fatter) and Europeans are becoming taller. The average Dutch male is now 5 cm taller than the average American male and the difference is growing. The difference in women is even greater. The average Dutch woman is 5.9 cm taller than her American counterpart. Despite the fundamental importance of this trend, this gets little or no press coverage in the United States for some reason.

Why is this happening? An article in Social Science Quarterly says “… we can conjecture that there are differences in the diet of U.S. and European children that could affect human growth. For example, U.S. children consume more meals prepared outside the home, more fast food rich in fat, high in energy density, and low in essential micronutrients, than do European children.”

For the moment, Americans are still doing well on average in terms of lifespan but this may be due to the oceans of drugs we consume to treat illness. It’s better not to get sick in the first place so this lead will probably disappear as the current “short and fat generation” ages.

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