Fossils linked to Maori legend of man-eating bird
The giant Haast’s Eagle, which died out at least 500 years ago, was originally thought to have been a scavenger, but new analysis of fossils indicates that it was a lion-level predator…making it the probable basis for the Maori Te Hokioi legend.
Weird: Routine Coast Guard training exercise spooks press because it’s 9/11. I wonder how many people were freaked out by the shuttle landing’s sonic boom because of the timing?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of disks on the freeway. Or a pigeon with a datacard.
[A] company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a “data card” strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data.
2024 (well, 2023) update: Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet (via)
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers. With the proliferation of super-fast home connectivity like gigabit fiber, one might expect the carrier pigeon to be blown away in 2023. Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin. However, as you will learn later, the pigeon gets outpaced at distances over about 600 miles.
I’d been wondering whether bandwidth or SD card density had changed faster since then!
From @ThisIsTrue:
AMAZING false-color NASA satellite pic of the damage caused by LA’s Station Fire.
Yes. Yes it is. (Full size on the linked article.)
Ack! Who puts cashews on Hawaiian pizza?
Apparently Red Brick Pizza does. They kindly made a replacement without them.
*whew*
Constant Vigilance!
It was listed on the menu, and I should have looked more closely…but who expects nuts of any kind on Hawaiian pizza? It’s standard: crust, tomato sauce, cheese, ham, and pineapple. Checking for nuts on that would be like checking for strawberry jam on a cheeseburger.
The wind’s changed, the weather’s cooled off, and firefighters are starting to get the Station Fire under control. For the first time in days, we’ve been able to see the San Gabriel Mountains.
The eastern part of the range was clearly visible this afternoon — more visible than it usually is during the summer, with LA’s famous smog. The middle was completely shrouded in smoke. Interestingly, while it looks like the plume is being blown east, visibility seems to be worse toward the western end. Maybe wind near the ground is blowing west, and wind higher up is blowing east?
Compare to this shot of the mountains covered in snow last December:
