Friday, November 28, 2008 at 11:00 am
Breaking Squid News, Stephen Hawking, Etc.
Extremely longtime readers of this blog -- of which there might not actually be any -- will know that nothing gets me more excited than breakthroughs in squid science. Judge then how excited I was when this footage surfaced:
(Actually it surfaced in 2007, but the blogosphere only just noticed this week (I got it from i09), so that means it only just happened.) The footage was captured by a robotic submersible operated by Shell Oil off the coast of Mexico, a mile and a half down. Apparently it was forwarded around for a while before somebody figured out that what they were looking at was an extremely rare long-arm squid, part of the genus Magnapinna. I totally want one of those.
If this turns out to be a viral video promoting Cloverfield 2: Crimson and Clover, then I'm sorry.
(Incidentally "researching" Magnapinna on Wikipedia led me to this awesome artifact: the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Apparently the worst possible thing you can be stung by is a bullet ant. I probably wasn't ever going to go to Paraguay, but now I'm really not going.)
Also, Stephen Hawking has accepted a job in Ontario. Those Canadians won't stop till the rest of have nothing left. Nothing!
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Lev Grossman is a senior writer at TIME. As TIME's book critic he has written profiles of Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Jonathan Franzen, John Updike, John le Carré, Stephenie Meyer, Khaled Hosseini and J.K. Rowling, among many others. The New York Times has called him one of "this country's smartest and most reliable critics." Read more
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Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer.
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Friday, November 28, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I don't think I'd want to have lunch with a Tarantula Hawk Wasp either. 2" long... Second most painful sting after the Bullet Ant. Description quoted on Wikipedia: "...immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one's ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations." Sounds like it could be in the next Bond movie.
Friday, November 28, 2008 at 6:57 pm
The Tholian squid is totally real. There's been around twelve sightings. IIRC, this one was imaged a year ago by an oil company's ROV, but made a slow year-long circuit before it ended up being passed to scientists (the images, not the squid.)
Monday, December 1, 2008 at 2:21 pm
This video is extremely cool, as is your blog. I just discovered it by accident today; I suspect I'm going to be much less bored at work! yea!