maybe i'm just giddy that it's friday, but i found this vogue italia fashion spread to be the perfect bit of entertainment for those of us who revel in low class celebrity trash but aspire to be highbrow, tasteful fashionistas. frankly, i think it's brilliant. [via shesbitter]
Yesterday I promised in comments to figure out how lossless compression algorithms work. Lossless compression schemes are those that let you store a signal without losing any information -- think of ZIP files, for example. Turns out my top-of-my-head theoretical explanation wasn't bad -- a bunch of lossless compression algorithms do work similarly, and it's a set-in-stone fact that a lossless codec will make some worst-case files larger than they started out.
But I was specifically asked about FLAC, a lossless codec designed for audio. FLAC can take PCM data (a digital audio signal) and compress it to anywhere from 30-70% of its original size without losing any data. Neat. But how does it work?
now why don't they have this kind of shit at the national zoo? the baby cheetahs are cute, but this thing could blow them out of the water:
Behold Hercules the mighty liger — 900 pounds of big cat that's part lion, part tiger and all humongous.This King Kong of cats is not the work of a mad scientist, but the product of a rarely seen feline love affair that took place in a South Carolina animal preserve.
"We have a big free-roaming area at our preserve," explained Hercules' owner, Dr. Bhagavan Antle, who is showing off Hercules this weekend at a Miami animal park.
"Sometimes lions and tigers are allowed to go out there and, lo and behold, one particular lion fell in love with one particular tiger and we had babies."
Huge but gentle, the 12-foot-long Hercules is tall enough at 3 years old to dunk a basketball as he rises up on his hind legs.
To maintain such bulk, he can devour up to 100 pounds of raw meat in a day. This intake gives him the massive strength of a lion and the 50-mph quickness of a tiger.
And at just 3, he's a baby in liger years.
"He is already as big as his mother and father put together," said Antle, who keeps Hercules at the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species in Miami.
"And he should keep growing until he is 7."
Hercules isn't the only Liger in the country. He has three brothers from his tiger mom's litter — Vulcan, Zeus and Sinbad.
Ligers — which have a mane like a lion and stripes like a tiger — are the result of a union between a lion dad and a tiger mom. They are unheard of in the wild, but occasionally happen when the two kinds of great cats wind up meeting in captivity. It is a rare occurrence because there seem to be few tigers and lions that hit it off romantically.
"You gotta have mild-mannered lions and tigers," Antle said. "Normally the lion will kill the tigers."
Spend it reading comics.
Scary Go Round has got a good story going on, plus its usual amazing artwork.
And Boy On A Stick And Slither has been on a mini-roll lately.
Looks like a transcript of Larry Summers' remarks has been released. Between this and the tarring and feathering of Eason Jordan, it seems like blogs are rapidly destroying the concept "off the record". I'm not sure that's a good thing.
But, with that said, it's now apparent that Summers' comments were pretty dumb: he seems to think that sex differences' influence on variance in aptitude is more pronounced than their influence on mean aptitude, but he more or less discounts the role of discrimination and socialization out of hand, calling them "lesser factors". I think both camps in this little online debate ended up staking out tenable positions, but Summers' newly-clarified position doesn't seem to line up with the measured pro-Summers appraisal that I'd arrived at. So allow me to amend my position: Larry's a dick.
However, I still believe that Naomi's proficiency at Dr. Mario is an astounding biological oddity.
Scott Moschella's conducting an interesting experiment. He bought and downloaded a track from the iTunes Music Store, violated the DMCA by using JHymn to remove its copy protection, then placed it on his website and invited visitors to download it. The catch: the song, from Sonic Youth side-project Ciccone Youth, consists of 1:03 of silence.
Will Sonic Youth come after Moschella? Will the RIAA? Will John Cage's estate sue everybody? Stay tuned.
American Dad will be replacing Arrested Development
Arrested Development's quality seems to have fallen off a bit this season, but American Dad is an abomination. Unfortunately, Fox executives saw that it drew 15 million viewers in its post-Superbowl debut -- that's way more than the 6 million Arrested Development gets every (non-Superbowl) week! QED.
