CrankyGeeks 1987 Style has been added as a related post - related requested by braschlosan on that post.

Hmm... now you've made me curious too. I have found a few interesting pages, but nothing specifically about frog vision apart from mentions that it's sensitive.

• How Stuff Works has a How frogs work article.
  
• The Whole Frog Project provides a virtual frog for high school biology students, based on MRI data, mechanical sectioning, and some software to allow visualising of the anatomical structures of the intact animal.
  
• The UW Sea grant site has a frogs page with resources for kids + teachers that has an origami frog (among other things).
  

I'm not quite as sure about the single photon claim. I found a Physicsworld.com article from September 2012 talking about using a single rod cell from a frog eye being used as an extremely sensitive detector which is able to detect a single photon, but according to the original Usenet Physics FAQ (I cite an updated version hosted at math.ucr.edu) human retinas can also respond to a single photon, but have a neural filter to block the signal unless 5 to 9 photons arrive within less than 100 ms.

References

Julie Schnapf, "How Photoreceptors Respond to Light", Scientific American, April 1987

S. Hecht, S. Schlaer and M.H. Pirenne, "Energy, Quanta and vision." Journal of the Optical Society of America, 38, 196-208 (1942)

D.A. Baylor, T.D. Lamb, K.W. Yau, "Response of retinal rods to single photons." Journal of Physiology, Lond. 288, 613-634 (1979)

My progression was.....
Commodore 64 (1983),
Atari520ST (1987),
Atari 1040ST (1987), (Hard drive!)
IBM PC/AT (1988),
Macintosh 2 (1990),
80486 66DX2, (1992),
Pentium overdrive for the 486DX2 (1995),
Dual Pentium MMX 166 (1996) ,
Pentium-2 333mhz (1998), (Dual voodoo-2)
Pentium-3 800mhz (2000),
Pentium D 2.8gz ( 2006),
Core i7-920 ( 2009),
Core i7-970 (2011).

Lesser machines along the way... a Macintosh SE I cant place on the timeline. My biggest regret was sticking with the Pentium-3 for so long. Wasn't so interested though.

Some very old (and stripped down) notes I have, from a beginners course I used to teach on web graphics and image formats. (it does loose a little something in translation with the limited formatting we can use here).

GIF: (Graphics Interchange Format)
Limited to 256 colors and less.
Recommended - 72 dpi.
8-bit color planes


Originally designed by Compuserve. June 1987

It used a compression scheme called LZW.
Gif utilizes a compression method which uses a particular algorithm. This algorithm is copyrighted by Unisys. Any software which supports the format must obtain the rights to use the format but all users are free to use it.
Because of this issue..., a new format called PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is slowly infiltrating, and is expected to eventually replace the GIF.


How it compresses...

1. It compresses repeated patterns of pixels in an image.
   
2. The more repeated patterns there are in an image, the more it can be compressed. When the image is decompressed it is
   exactly the same as the original image.
   
3. Example:
   
   If the code looks like this - (@ 42-bytes)
   1 5 6 4 6 7 9 1 2 5 6 9 8 4 5 8 9 2 5 6 9 8 5 6 7 2 5 6 9 6 1 5 6 4 6 7 9 7 8 2 5 6
   
   The conversion looks for repeating strings of more than 3 numbers -
   1 5 6 4 6 7 9 1 2 5 6 9 8 4 5 8 9 2 5 6 9 8 5 6 7 2 5 6 9 6 1 5 6 4 6 7 9 7 8 2 5 6
   
   It then replaces the strings with a "token". It refers to which number it repeats and for how many characters -
   1 5 6 4 6 7 9 1 2 5 6 9 8 4 5 8 9 [9,5] 5 6 7 [9,4] 6 [1,7] 7 8 [9,3]
   
   
4. Each "token" takes 2 bytes. having eliminated several repeating characters, our code is now only 31-bytes
   

Points to note:

• GIF uses Lossless, Pattern Matching Compression
  
• It compresses repeated patterns of pixels in an image.
  
• The more repeated patterns there are in an image, the more it can be compressed.
  
• When the image is decompressed it is exactly the same as the original image
  

Summary:
When you convert images to the GIF format you first must reduce the number of colors to 256 or less, (this process looses information). The fewer the colors, the smaller the file. But when the image is compressed, no image detail is lost.

>> ^L0cky:
I looked at a lot of sources, including CDC. They have a helpful compilation of their stats in the form of their CDC's 2007 chart book. It shows that firearm related deaths and poisoning are always less than motor vehicles; firearms are more likely to cause an early death; while death from poison is more likely to get you in middle age (possbily this includes long term effects of poisoning, ie working with hazardous materials when they were younger?).
It also doesn't show non death injuries; nor can the stats reflect the fact that every household has potential poisons while around half of households have firearms.
I took a look at the pdf, and while the charts are nice, they cover various date ranges and present their results in different formats, and I think you're misinterpreting them. What I did was use the search feature and look at the raw data. You can also search for non death injuries, but gun related non deadly injuries, accidental or intentional, doesn't even make the top 20, and it doesn't show anything below that.

>> ^L0cky:
In absolute terms it's inarguable that there are a lot of gun related deaths and injury in the US (around 31,000 deaths and 70,000 injuries per year give or take). This doesn't change simply because there are other causes of death and injury.
You just said that your source doesn't show non death injuries, yet now you're claiming 30,000 deaths and 70,000 injuries per year. You claim to be getting your sources from the same place, but the data from the CDC shows that between 1999 and 2010 the average homicide by firearm is 12,807 deaths per year. If you add accidental deaths involving firearms the total comes to 21,146 which accounts for 9.6% of all accidental and intentional deaths (this does not include suicide, illness and disease related deaths).

>> ^L0cky:
Let me be clear, my argument is that non sport firearms don't add anything positive to society that justifies the resulting gun related injury, death and crime. The granting of firearm licenses for hunting and sport should require strict licensing that's based on a requirement of training and testing. Gun control laws should be purposefully strict.
We already have plenty of gun control laws. More laws are not going to stop someone that has no intention of obeying them. You obviously did not read the whole article I linked to as it points out that "93 percent of the guns obtained by violent criminals are not obtained through lawful transactions that are the focus of most gun control legislation.

>> ^L0cky:
I haven't objected to this. My objection is to the suggestion that a societal need to teach children how to use firearms can be used to justify their existence. It's circular logic; and I'd prefer not to live in a society where learning to use firearms is a requirement of safety.
No one said that you need to teach children to use guns to justify their existence. You were a kid once (or still are), and at a certain age didn't you do the opposite of everything your parents said? If there is going to be a gun in a house, even if they are told it's dangerous and not to be played with and you do your best to lock it up and keep it away from them, if they do get their hands on it wouldn't it be better that they knew how to properly handle it so they don't end up adding to the accidental death by firearm statistic? Cars are dangerous too, but we teach our kids how to be safe in and around cars (wear your seat belt, look both ways before crossing street, etc.), why are you so freaked out about teaching a kid gun safety?

Your philosophy that kids shouldn't be taught how to use guns because guns are bad is basically the same as abstinence only sex education, AKA teaching ignorance.

>> ^L0cky:
I'm not stating this, I'm questioning it. You yourself said you own them for self defense.
I said I own guns for many reasons, self defense being one of them. You still seem to be confused about why someone chooses to carry a gun for self defense. It looks to me based on what you've written is that you assume someone carries a gun only to protect themselves from other gun owners. As I already pointed out, only 10% of violent crimes involve the use of a gun. I carry to protect myself from 100% of crimes.

>> ^L0cky:
That has zero effect on the number violent crimes that DO involve the use of a gun.
You can't pick out a small portion of a larger statistic to base your argument on, you need to take into account the whole picture. That's like saying 2001 was a slow year for terrorism, if you don't count the World Trade Center attacks.

>> ^L0cky:
This isn't a useful number unless you can show that those crimes would not have been prevented without guns; and would still have occurred without guns.
I don't know what more you expect, a crime was in progress, a lawfully armed citizen stopped it and it was reported to the police. What your asking isn't possible as the only way to know what would have happened in the other situations is to invent a time machine.

>> ^L0cky:
I guess your point is that gun ownership reduces crime. I'm open to that - if it can be shown more clearly.
What is clear from comparing to other countries, particularly those with comparative gun ownership is that the lack of gun control in the US correlates to an increase in gun related death and injury by an order of magnitude. The problem isn't gun ownership in and of itself; it's gun ownership without lack of appropriate gun control laws.
If guns don't reduce crime, then why do we give them to the police? Once more back to that article you didn't read:

"In 13 states citizens who wish to carry arms may do so, having met certain requirements. Consider Florida, which in 1987 enacted a concealed-carry law guaranteeing a gun permit to any resident who is at least 21, has no record of crime, mental illness or drug or alcohol abuse, and who has completed a firearms safety course. Florida's homicide rate fell following the enactment of this law, as did the rate in Oregon after the enactment of a similar law. Through June 1993, there had been 160,823 permits issued in Florida. Only 530, or 0.33 percent, of the applicants have been denied permits. This indicates that the law is serving the law abiding. Only l6 permits, less than 1/100th of 1 percent, have been rescinded because of the commission, after issuance, of a crime involving a firearm."

>> ^L0cky:
You're right, if guns suddenly vanished tomorrow there would still be crime and violence. However, it would be crime and violence without guns; and I think, that (of itself) is preferable. How could it not be?
Are you fucking serous? Why is a murder with a gun any worse than a knife, baseball bat or even bare hands? A murder is a murder no matter what tool is used to commit it. Other crimes besides murder would be better off without guns, but what part of 90% of violent crimes do not involve the use of a gun did you not understand? If you take away guns from everyone, you're only removing 10% of the tools used by violent criminals, and that doesn't guarantee that violent crime will drop by 10%? In reality you wouldn't be removing anything from criminals because "93 percent of the guns obtained by violent criminals are not obtained through lawful transactions that are the focus of most gun control legislation. So you essentially want to take away every law abiding citizen's right to defend themselves with a gun without doing anything to stop criminals from committing crimes with guns.

>> ^L0cky:
Crime in the UK has reduced dramatically according to The Office for National Statistics between before then (1999/2001) and now, including firearm offences. In Australia assault is up, robbery is down and sexual assault is about the same according to the Australian Institute of Criminology. Homicides involving firearms have continued to decline to their lowest on record.
From your source: "Provisional figures for the year ending June 2012 show that 5,507 firearm offences were recorded in England and Wales, an 18 per cent decrease on the previous year (6,694)." In 1997 when the ban was enacted only 2,648 crimes were reported involving guns. It looks like that ban has worked well.


>> ^L0cky:
I pulled it from the same source you are correcting me with
The CDC - Injury in the United States: 2007 Chart Book, page 24.
Statisticslol
This is where you have misinterpreted the graphs. The vertical portion of that graph is in deaths per 100,000 population. If you dig up the raw numbers from the search engine this is what you'll find:

Motor Vehicle Accident = 22%
Homicide by Firearm = 13%
Accident by Firearm = 0.5%

>> ^dzonny:

Crumb is a savant of sexuality.


Yes, and all about the femme! Adjusted:)

4 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

I really had nearly forgotten how much I love this video

In some weird way, in 1987, William Shatner was a guy who wanted to go camping with you and tell you about how tough young men have a passionate affair with the mountain

Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
Their early work was a little too New Wave for my taste. But then Sports came out in 1983, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that gives the songs a big boost.
He's been compared to Elvis Costello but I think Huey has a more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
Then in 1987 Huey released this, Fore!, their most accomplished album. I think I heir undisputed masterpiece is "Hip To Be Square," a song so catchy that most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of
trends. It's also a personal statement about the band itself.

I was originally going to leave it when @Barseps tagged it but another sifter convinced me to change it. Yeah it's silly, but if you don't like it just downvote and move on. >> ^brycewi19:

>> ^xxovercastxx:
Uh... it is a meme and the song is from 1987. Not sure what the downvote and removal is for.

Because Lann thinks it's funny still to trick people with a rickroll. rolleyes

>> ^xxovercastxx:

Uh... it is a meme and the song is from 1987. Not sure what the downvote and removal is for.


Because Lann thinks it's funny still to trick people with a rickroll. *rolleyes

Uh... it is a meme and the song is from 1987. Not sure what the downvote and removal is for.

Yay, thank you!

In reply to this comment by Barseps:
Bit of a long response, but I REALLY have something to say here. Two performing artists from the 1980's stuck out in my mind because I always figured that the 2nd song they released was W-A-Y better than their first. This song was indeed JHJ's first single, but the next song they released struck a chord with me because it had a humanitarian feel to it....the cynic in me says it didn't do too well 'cos the PC brigade didn't want a clean-cut band singing a song that tipped a hat to prostitutes .... but, ho hum.

"Pure Heart Of Gold" - (Johnny Hates Jazz)


Artist number two was a guy called Rupert Holmes, he was most famously known for the "Pina Colada" song, but his 2nd release (which was ALSO a song about cheating within a relationship) just seemed to get to the heart of the matter that bit more & was a better song in my book.

"Him" - (Rupert Holmes)


If I'd known this post was in Beggar's Canyon, it wouldn't have been there for very long, I can tell you that much. Thanks for the trip down memory lane @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/mintbbb" title="member since April 30th, 2008" class="profilelink"><strong style="color:#00d9ff">mintbbb

^Upvoted^
*History
*Quality
& if you're looking for me I'll be browsing "Beggar's Canyon"

Thanks for the promote
In reply to this comment by Deano:
*promote