Cassowary attacks

Cassowaries have a reputation in folklore for being dangerous to people and domestic animals. During World War II American and Australian troops stationed in New Guinea were warned to steer clear of them. In his book Living Birds of the World from 1958, ornithologist Ernest Thomas Gilliard wrote:

The inner or second of the three toes is fitted with a long, straight, murderous nail which can sever an arm or eviscerate an abdomen with ease. There are many records of natives being killed by this bird.

This assessment of the danger posed by cassowaries has been repeated in print by authors including Gregory S. Paul (1988) and Jared Diamond (1997). A 2003 historical study of 221 cassowary attacks showed that 150 had been against humans. 75% of these had been from cassowaries that had been fed by people. 71% of the time the bird had chased or charged the victim. 15% of the time they kicked. Of the attacks, 73% involved the birds expecting or snatching food, 5% involved defending natural food sources, 15% involved defending themselves from attack, and 7% involved defending their chicks or eggs. The 150 attacks included only one human death.

The one documented human death was caused by a cassowary on 6 April 1926. 16-year-old Phillip McClean and his brother, aged 13, came across a cassowary on their property and decided to try to kill it by striking it with clubs. The bird kicked the younger boy, who fell and ran away as his older brother struck the bird. The older McClean then tripped and fell to the ground. While he was on the ground the cassowary kicked him in the neck, opening a 1.25 cm (0.49 in) wound which may have severed his jugular vein. The boy died of his injuries shortly afterwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

You might be disappointed, I'm pretty sure that this is the video where he gives the explanation, which is fault line geothermal heating. In the TED talk he says that it's a really unusual type of geothermal heating that's not found anywhere else. Most hot springs are volcanic, but not here.

Here is an article which shows the various fault lines in and around Peru, including one close to Pucallpa - http://temblor.net/earthquake-insights/ecuador-peru-and-colombia-faults-hint-where-large-earthquakes-could-strike-2128/

Ohhh Japan LA, you make me smile

No, not take Weinstein for example, that is an entirely different case and it undermines your position to use such an obvious straw man.

Society promotes the concept that men are violent, women are not. Any man that uses physical violence on a women is evil and if a woman raises a hand to a man and he strikes her in defense, he would still be the one that had to explain himself. Look at the Duluth model re: domestic violence sometime to see how truly baked in the myth that men are the perps and women are the vics...

https://medium.com/iron-ladies/men-are-still-pigs-the-politicization-of-domestic-violence-2cfa7488c204 (written by a woman for noting)

Particularly salient.

[i]It’s clear to me that despite the fact the Duluth Model has proven to be worthless, programs still adhere to the same principles. Men are still the automatic perpetrators, women are always victims. What’s worse is the men under attack by violent wives have no way of protecting themselves. Their right to self-defense in domestic violence cases has been cancelled.[/i]

I'm all for acknowledging that differences between the sexes is an absolutely real thing, but the long and the short of it is that women are basically allowed to assault men almost without consequences, but in the reverse situation the man would (justifiably) have the book thrown at him. And while men do have the physical advantage (although not always), they are hamstrung by society. The mere threat of a rape accusation (or far worse, the accusation that the husband has been abusing the kids) would silence most men in a heartbeat because they understand that the police, the judge, the social workers will believe the woman first.

Violence is wrong as is giving women a free pass because they rolled vagina in the game of life.

Firefighting strike team respond to Sonoma fire to find... has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

Good for him. His remake still strikes me as amateurish and unoriginal as his red font but whatever pays the rent.

Thoughts:

1) There has been a ban on sales of new, fully-automatic firearms ("machine guns") since 1986. That leaves some loopholes (can still buy them if they were manufactured before then, but that demand plus scarcity makes them expensive, etc.) but in general, there isn't a whole lot of uproar over that 20-year-old ban.

2) These bump-fire stocks don't technically convert a firearm into fully-automatic; the trigger is still being pulled 1 time for each bullet that comes out (semi-automatic).

3) However, they easily allow for rates of fire (bullets per minute/second) comparable to fully-automatic weapons. So, I think an unbiased and reasonable person would say that while a firearm equipped with one of these does not violate the letter of the ban on fully-automatic firearms, it does quite reasonably violate the spirit of that ban.

4) Doing anything to correct that discrepancy will require updated laws. Updating the law requires a legislature that generally supports the update and a president that agrees, or a legislature that overwhelmingly supports the update and can override a presidential veto.

5) None of that exists at the moment in the US. So, it is (perhaps coldly) logical to say that these bump-fire stocks will not be banned as an extension to the 1986 ban on full-auto firearms, at least not in the short term.

6) However, before quietly accepting that, it is worth noting that political fallout amongst those individuals in the legislature that refuse to consider updating the law is a very real possibility. Plenty of people, even on the right, even plenty of gun nuts, say that they are in favor of some degree of "common sense" gun control. Pointing out that bump-fire stocks essentially circumvent the already in-place ban on fully-automatic firearms seems like a good way to test that professed adherence to common sense.

7) Get that word out there, and pretty importantly, try to do it in a way that is as respectful towards the average "gun nut" as possible. Their minds can be swayed. Hunters, sportsmen, and even people that have guns for self defense can be persuaded with reason -- they can still do their thing even without bump-fire stocks, just like they can do their thing without fully-automatic firearms. Congresscritters probably can't be convinced, because they've already been bribed"persuaded" with campaign donations, NRA lobbyists, etc.


So, don't preach to the choir. Try to convince the people that do actually own guns. The good news? You've got "common sense" on your side.

Interesting stuff, I don't agree with the 'bigger isn't necessarily better' conclusion he came to. Sauropods lasted a good 150 million years, and it took a massive worldwide external extinction event like an asteroid strike to take them out.

Humans have been around in some form for a fair bit less than 200,000 years. Stretching that to apes you can get to 10 million at a push. Even the early primates probably wouldn't have had their break if it weren't for that extinction event a mere 65 million years back.

Come back to me in 3 million generations and I'll ceded the point.

A little change in punctuation, capitalisation, and spelling clears it up a bit.

It's Cousin Itt swimming.

To be fair, I didn't know that it's supposed to be Itt rather than It. The resemblance and grace are indeed striking though.

While I'm here, my favourite example of necessary capitalisation is that time I helped my uncle Jack off a horse.

To add to that; if these athletes really did protest outside of the sporting event I seriously doubt it would get any coverage AT ALL. I HIGHLY doubt that the media would give it any air time!

This doesn't hurt anyone directly... it's not obscene... they're not delaying game time... I just don't see how it can strike up such controversy. I'm sorry you had to think about the plight of people of color in this country on your leisurely game day Sunday?

We need more people of color in our governing body's if you don't want to see someone take a knee during the national anthem.

Let them have their time and raise awareness.

Your video, Lightning strikes nearby tree, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Too bad no one can convince Trump of that. He's the one stating clearly and publicly that we'll act unilaterally and preemptively if there are more threats (followed immediately by another threat by lil' Kim), and he is also the one who suggests we'll use nukes in that preemptive strike.

You may be right, no harm done. Other than me rolling my eyes because yet another person is suffering from “syndrome-itis”, and now they have a $10 word that magically elevates, explains and excuses their traits. It just strikes me as shallow and pretentious as someone who gets a Kanji tattoo without knowing shit about the culture.

Then again it may just me the Gemini in me. haha

Pink is a combination of red and white light.
There are almost surely numerous combinations of various spectral colors that will look exactly like ultra-pink to our limited eyes. Fitting into the various color gamuts involved in color reproduction and perception is not very simple at all.

Whiter than white washing powders work by using fluourescence -- they transmute some of the ultraviolet light striking them into visible light. The reason this works is explainable by a color gamut, the gamut of the human eye. If we could see in the ultraviolet range that is being absorbed then the trick wouldn't be nearly as effective. There are animals, for example bees, that do see colors bluer than we can, and in fact some flowers have patterns that are visible only to them.

It is possible that fluorescence is partly responsible for ultra-pinkness. If it is, that would have been more interesting than what was presented.

I suspect, but do not know, that the CMYK or RGB color representation schemes are up to the task of encoding the colors you describe. The problem is that there is no practical process that can sense them in an image, nor any practical process that can mechanically reproduce them.