Newley Purnell

I told you ten months ago that this would happen.

[Photo credit: twdbth]

A Canadian friend of mine from my time in Taiwan (yep, I’m lookin’ at you, Rob Junior*), once told me he grew up way far north in Saskatchewan.

How far north?

“Well,” Rob said, “my home town is about a 12 hour drive north of Regina**. Well, actually about eight hours — if you’re going in the winter you can drive across the lakes and that saves you some time.”

Drive across the lakes, I thought?

Since then, I’ve been intrigued by the idea. Curious about the practice? Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about ice driving in Canada.

[*Same guy, Rob Junior, formerly lived and taught high school science in Cut Knife, Saskatchewan (2001 pop.: 556), proud home of the world's largest tomahawk.]

[**Yes, Regina rhymes with what you think it rhymes with.]

As I’ve mentioned before, the Chinese think BIG when it comes to engineering. Peep their new project.

And speaking of the Cult of the Nalgene Bottle (of which, I must admit, I am an agua-swilling member), Stanley Goldfarb, in The Daily Standard, writes:

The supposed health benefit of consuming large volumes of water has become one of those urban myths that even some physicians have come to endorse without real insight into the science underlying water intake and its effects on the body.

Goldfarb (who’s an MD, by the way) says the human body’s exceptionally good at regulating hydration; any extra liquids we take on are unceremoniously excreted without having much of an impact on our overall health.

Related: Can Nalgene bottles make you sick?

I say this: Who cares, when their product design is so great? They’re like the Macs of water bottles.

BBC:

Scientists in Taiwan say they have bred three pigs that “glow in the dark”.

They claim that while other researchers have bred partly fluorescent pigs, theirs are the only pigs in the world which are green through and through.

The pigs are transgenic, created by adding genetic material from jellyfish into a normal pig embryo.

I totally want one.

Last night Faye and Jake and Chad and I launched into a discussion Chris D. and I have had occasionally in the past: How many cats would it take to pull a dog sled*?

I find this conundrum to be an especially intriguing thought experiment. How many cats does it take to pull what a typical dog can pull? 50? 100? I argue that a direct ratio of cat to dog pulling power is problematic, as my feeling is that cats cannot pull with as much torque compared to body weight as dogs can.

Anywho, we had a laugh about it last night and then Faye posed the question to Google this morning. She emailed me the following incredible Web site on which the above photo can be found: SledKitty.com.

Quoth the anonymous Northern Virginia resident who I admire for his/her sense of humor and desire to see a ridiculous project through to its absurd end:

One day, reading about how even small dogs can pull sleds, I got an idea. Sled cats! More specifically, sled cat. One of my cats, Socky, is a very special animal. He, unlike most cats, has been trained to do a variety of activities…Anyway, if small dogs can do it, I thought, why can’t Socky? So I set about training the world’s first sled cat.

Don’t miss the site, which contains additional hilarious photos of Socky competing in the “Hallditarod.”

*I am well aware that felines are much less obedient than canines. To those who say, “But Newley, you dumbass, cats would never pull a dog sled like pooches would — they’d all take off in different directions,” I respond thusly: The question is not if they’d be willing to pull the sled, but rather how much power they’d generate if they did. Besides, I believe cats might be made to all head in the same direction if you implemented a sort of catnip-and-stick apparatus, which would be, like, a big long stick with a sack of catnip hanging off the end.

Interesting little piece in the New York Times yesterday from Juan Forero. Seems that Ecuadorians on the coast are harvesting shark fins and selling them to Asia for big bucks — but that shark numbers might soon be thinning. (At $100 for a dorsal and pectoral set, I might’ve been right there with these guys when I was living in Cuenca and making 250 smackers a month.)

Worldprocessor features some gorgeous art/map mashups.

(Via Gridskipper.)

Absolutely insane.

In my most recent Gridskipper dispatch, I examine DC’s current cute animal fixation: giant baby panda Tai Shan. (Be sure to check out the readers’ comments at the bottom.)

Tai+Shan, Butterstick, pandas

AP:

RANSON, W.Va. - Either they misjudged the distance or they couldn’t take the traffic. For reasons that mystify authorities, five deer that made their way onto the top of a five-story parking garage suddenly leaped to their deaths Sunday.

Police Cpl. Steve Cox found the does’ bodies on a service road to the Charles Town Races & Slots, next to a security van they’d narrowly missed.

“They took the plunge,” he said. “It was just absolutely weird.”

Best part:

The carcasses were given to passers-by for butchering.

I think it would be stating the obvious to say: Only in West Virginia.

I saw this poster in my Metro car on the way to work this morning:

It’s from Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that “champions a healthy and just world.”

FOE’s claim — that global warming is responsible for the devastating storms of the past season — is a massive oversimplification of what we know about climate change and hurricanes. The actual working climate scientists say that it just ain’t that simple:

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

In fairness, they go on to note that:

…In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

So it may well be that global warming is exacerbating hurricanes, and it does, indeed, appear that sea surface temperatures, which fuel hurricanes, are on the rise. But in the aftermath of Katrina, it’s in poor taste for FOE to claim, as a matter of fact, that “warmer seas mean more killer storms.”

Global climate change is happening. We need to burn fewer fossil fuels. We need to do a better job of conserving energy. And we need to do whatever it takes to make New Orleans safe from future storms (including implementing a real, workable evacuation plan). But the situation is exponentially more nuanced, from a scientific perspective, than FOE makes it out to be.

UPDATE: Don’t miss my friend Ben Preston’s response to my post. Ben’s a climate scientist himself (now with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia, formerly at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change) and he points out some mixed messages FOE’s sending with this oversimplified poster.

Reader Katie C. sends along a link to this “shalom dog costume” available at (oddly enough) SantaSuits.com, which features a line of costumes for pooches.

The site contains lots of weird stuff, including an extensive selection of biblical character costumes. Perhaps my favorite is the deluxe Jesus costume (scroll down).

But the tackiness doesn’t stop there! Check out the absolute worst angel costume ever created (second one down).

Rob at Cockeyed.com presents: “The Price of a Gallon” of 47 liquids. It’s no surprise that gasoline’s way cheaper than stuff like milk, coffee mate, Evian water, Budweiser beer, etc. — of course, when was the last time you bought 15 or 20 gallons of that stuff?

If you ask me, though, a gallon of Kikkoman soy sauce for $15.33 is a bargain at twice the price. I love that stuff. Perhaps the most overpriced item on Rob’s list, though, is patchouli oil, which goes for $806.40 a gallon. C’mon.

If I had $38,858,507.46 laying around, however, you better believe I’d be picking up a gallon of scorpion venom. That would be awesome. If anyone ever gave me any lip, I’d totally be like, yo, you better shut the hell up or I’m gonna go get my gallon of scorpion venum and dump it all over you! They would shut up fast, I bet.

I’m usually not a huge fan of cats — they’re too attitudinal; I prefer a pet to be concerned with my happiness, not the other way around. Nevertheless, here’re some amusing clips of cats being silly. Good to see that dogs haven’t completely cornered the market on stupidity.