This month's American Scientist has a neat, short article about the Archer Fish, a species of fish that gets its food (flying or crawling bugs) by spitting watter at them and knocking them down. This appears to be done by visually tracking their prey, even across the refractive air-water boundary.

i just stumbled across an article titled emacs keybindings make you stupid. I am officially way way stupid. when i accidentally put too much of some ingredient in a sauce i'm cooking, i feel my fingers twitch for C-_ (or C-a C-k if i want to start over). I just pressed M-b to go back a word to edit this entry and brought down the bookmark menu of my web browser instead. i must do that a dozen times a day.

and sadly, my impulse is to want to "fix" the parts of the world that don't use emacs keybindings instead of retraining myself. i'm excited by the possibilities presented by MozEx, a mozilla extension that lets you edit a textarea in an arbitrary external text editor, for example.

This is so weird. Some Japanese researchers came up with a way to remotely control human movement. Oh it's so weird. Anyone who still thinks that their mind is tucked securely away in their skull should wake up and smell the coffee, or WE'LL MAKE YOU DO IT FROM AFAR!!!!!!!

A high school football player with no legs was removed from a game for violating a rule requiring players to wear shoes, thigh pads, and knee pads. It doesn't sound like he's on the same athletic level as the folks discussed here previously, but the rules they used to bar him from the game were interesting.

Apparently, he's used to moving down the field using his arms alone, and has played in the last 3 games.

i got bitten by a snake on saturday night. i've attached a rinky-dink cellphone picture of my feet from ~70 hours after the bite. Can you tell which foot it was? Boring details follow.

i was camping in the Shenandoah wilderness with a group of friends and acquaintances. i had hung the rope for the bear bag before the sun went down, but later on, after packing up from dinner, our bear bag started to look like it might be too heavy for the branch i had slung the rope over. i went off in the darkness (my flashlight batteries were shitty rechargables which kept dying on me) to see if i could put the rope in a better crotch of the tree. On my way up the side of the hill to the rope, i felt a sudden pain in my foot, and cried out. The folks back in camp immediately shouted to me and asked if i was OK, and i said "yeah, i just stubbed my toe on a sharp stick, i think." But it fucking hurt. i went up to the rope, and found that i couldn't really do anything about it succesfully without resetting it entirely. i didn't want to pull it down and try to rethrow it in the dark. and did i mention that my foot was hurting?

Interesting article today in the Times about two young men who both lost both of their legs (and arms) and now use crazy prosthetic legs. Interesting discussion about the increasing visibility and acceptance of machine-enhanced humans (cyborgs), and the technology behind them. Mentions, particularly, MIT, which has done quite a bit to further prosthetic technology (I have a couple of friends who are grad students at MIT and work specifically on prosthetics, working for a prof. who has no feet).

The NYT (registration required, or use bugmenot) has an article about the emergence of the asexual community. The article notes:

[the Asexual Visibility Network] defines an asexual as someone who "does not experience sexual attraction." This definition is, of course, distinct from the much older concept of asexual reproduction, practiced by amoebas, jellyfish and whiptail lizards, for example, as well as by many species of plants.

I learned today about this rather unusual situation where a baby was born with two heads. Oddly enough this was featured on an Oprah episode.

Apparantley this baby was the result of conjoined twins with one developing incompletely only as a head, attached at the base of each of their skulls. Amazingly it was able to survive parasitically receiving all of its blood/oxygen/nutrients from the fully formed body of its twin.

As the fully developed twin was medically compromised by the parasitical twin, the decision was made to remove the attached head in order to allow for the other to survive.

Oscar Pistorius is the subject of an article in the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum. He's a pretty incredible athlete: a sprinter born without feet who (with a pair of fancy prosthetics) is rapidly approaching Olympic times for his races (100-, 200-, and 400-meter). They seem to think that he'll be ready for the 2008 Olympics.

Another South African disabled athlete is Natalie du Toit, who is a swimmer whose left leg was amputated below the knee. She seems to be winning or placing significantly in competitions against able-bodied athletes, and is aiming for the 2008 Olympics as well. Given that she's not swimming with any prosthetic device, i don't see how they'll be able to keep her out.

So joelee, his mom, and i watched Sound and Fury, a really interesting documentary about the debate over cochlear implants. We've discussed this before, but seeing the documentary was really worth it. i recommend it.

There's more info about the film on-line here, and in particular, i recommend the deaf voices section. Very challenging, provoking stuff.

Discussion also turned to Laurent, South Dakota, which was featured in a recent NYT article (i think -- don't have the link handy): it's a town designed around ASL being the primary language.