popplers

Fewer hit points, more charisma?

Via Boing Boing: I loved this essay on Weight Watchers as RPG.

"Indeed, I'm in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user into the semantics -- and fun -- of gameplay. You regard losing weight as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind."

So, who's up for a new Chore Wars campaign this weekend?

Science quickies!

• Fascinating NYT article on the short life of the Furcifer labordi chameleon, including a discussion of selective pressures that will be quite familiar to any players of Ursuppe. "[T]he entire life span of the Furcifer labordi chameleon — from the moment of conception to development in the egg, hatching, maturation, breeding and right through to its last little lizardly thud to the ground — clocks in at barely a year."
• More smart corvids: magpies and the mirror test.
• Confused sea turtles march into Italian restaurant: "The baby turtles -- which ended up under the tables of startled diners at the beachside restaurant -- were probably thrown off track and lured by the eatery's bright lights, said Antonio Colucci, who was called to help rescue the group." (I prefer to think that they were just looking for some really good pasta all'amatriciana.)
• Today's plague-y tidbit: apparently the enormous death toll in the 1918 influenza pandemic wasn't solely due to the flu. Let's give a big hand to our special guest star, bacterial pneumonia. Yay, co-infections!

And this has nothing to do with science, but I loved the awesome headline and some of the bizarre reportage within the story: Monkey eludes dragnet at Tokyo train station. "The standoff ended when the monkey climbed down and dashed out of the station, with several policeman and local TV crews in tow. News reports said the monkey was last seen heading in the direction of nearby Yoyogi Park." (Send out an APB!) "The animal appeared to be a Japanese monkey, which are native to the country, and was about 27 inches (70 centimeters) long from head to the tip of the tail. No one was injured and no trains were delayed in the incident."

Happy Corvidae!

I really enjoyed this TED talk on corvids. I had previously read about crows fashioning their own tools, and I've watched the entire David Attenborough Life of Birds series. But Joshua Klein's peanut vending machine is sublime. Love it!