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| I have backyard fox. Some have backyard badger. |
In the Land of the Blind the Robot Dog is King?
A Japanese company has created a robot dog to help guide the blind.
The H in HSUS Stands for Hedgefund:
The New York Post reports that "HSUS's advertisements employ the images of downtrodden dogs and cats to tug at the heart strings and wallets of America's pet lovers. But CCF's new analysis finds HSUS is a "Humane Society" in name only, sharing a meager $527,566, or 0.4 percent of its $120 million budget with sheltering organizations nationwide in 2010. In the same year, HSUS spent $47 million in fundraising-related costs (37 percent of its total budget) and put $32 million in hedge funds." Hat tip to Chas for this one!
Such Hawks Such Hounds:
A great title, but it's not what you think it's about. This web site is in my Google Reader and it keeps me up on the documentary world. This doc is about "music and musicians of the American hard rock underground circa 1970-2007, focusing on the psychedelic and ’70s proto-metal-derived styles that have in recent years formed a rich body of unclassifiable sounds." Ugh right. I was there, remember?
Nairobi is Switching to Solar-Powered Street Lights:
Is the future looking bright, or what?
Nature Wants to Eat You:
Looks to be a nice new blog on tumblr.
How to Load Your E-Reader With Free E-Books:
This might be handy when I buy a Kindle "Fire" in a week or two.
This is a Palindrome:
Step on no pets.
9 comments:
And what do you call a group of badgers??
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/about/faqs/animals/names.htm
A cete. and what's a cete?
World English Dictionary
cete(siːt)
—n a group of badgers
[C15: perhaps from Latin coetusassembly, from coīreto come together]
I find it interesting that the word ONLY means a group of Badgers.
Were there that many groups of Badgers at one time that humans gave them a special term?
confused Debi and the anxious TX JRTs
Actually what I want to know is why research dollars pour endlessly into robot dog noses or robot guide dogs etc. when the dog is ubiquitous and ready as is!
European badgers, unlike American badgers or groundhogs, are quite communal and you may have five or six in a big old sette. Some European badger settes are several hundred years old. In contrast, the American badger is an almost entirely solitary figure and tends to change holes and dig new settes every few days. The reason for the different lifestyles has to do with food: the European badger lives mostly on worms, beetles, and bulbs and so has sustainable food sources very low on the chain, while the badger eats rats, mice, groundsquirrles, gophers, snakes and lizards which are a bit higher up. An American badger can eat out an area pretty quickly, so it tends to wander.
P
I supect the robot seeing eye dog will never see action, but I do suspect the blind will move to sensors before too long.
P
It appears there is a white cat sitting at the corner of the badger photo. I count 22 badgers. I'd pay money to see that in my backyard. Evidently, the cat is unperturbed!
Seahorse
Notice how all those badgers are EXACTLY the same size, identically marked and are never looking at each other? I reckon that well-populated garden had precisely one badger in it, plus a householder with a tripod-mounted camera and fixed light source.
Take a lot of pictures of said badger roaming over the garden, then combine them with a little bit of Photoshop magic and there we go...
Actually Dan, the badgers look to be different sizes depending on depth of field. That is NOT to say they are not photoshopped, but hard to tell. If you were photoshopping it would seem odd to put a cat in the lower right of the picture. I did a little Internet research and found 26 places where this picture shows up on the Internet. See >> http://www.tineye.com/search/b596ed811fbc6101ca2b53fc76f3bbf9da4202b5/
No obvious original source there, but I DID find a pretty big version of the picture that makes me think it is not photoshopped >> http://files.sharenator.com/10101010_Worlds_laziest_predators-s1023x681-46335.jpg
Here's a rescue in Kent with 9 badgers >> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1167725/Earning-stripes-The-adorable-badger-cubs-abandoned-mothers.html
Another mislabeled terrier (possibly a mix) available in Phoenix. Somebody out here has a very prolific patterdale. I'm seeing new pups on the lists every somany months.
http://www.azhumane.org/dogs.shtml
BRAXTON - ID#A369593
Wish I could round them all up and see if they are all related. One bitch, all these pups? *shakes head*
I try to remind people to support their local shelter when they are donating. So many shelters out there, And I've picked two dogs up from local Humane Society facilities. People don't know to make the distinction between HS and HSUS.
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