Photo of the Day (5.20.2008)

by Martha Edwards on


Someone once told me that the sign of a good writer was the ability to make something mundane sound interesting. I think the same goes for photography — it’s the ability to see ordinary things in an extraordinary way, coupled with the ability to capture that view in your lens.

That’s what I like about this photo of a birch tree by Roberta Attalla. When was the last time you looked at a birch tree up close? My favourite aspect of this photo is the spectacular depth of field.

Have a photo to share? Submit it to our Gadling Flickr Pool.

Japan needs a panda

by Jamie Rhein on

A beloved treasure of the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo died yesterday. Ling Ling, the panda who became an ambassador of goodwill of sorts, and a world traveler looking for a mate had heart failure. In human years, Ling Ling was 70. In panda years, 22.

Now the zoo is without a panda, and Ling Ling was without offspring. He was flown to Mexico three times to give him a chance to procreate. He also spent spent some time in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C according to this Smithsonian magazine article, I found. Most importantly, he was part of the peace agreement with China in 1972. People in Tokyo are broken up over the news and are leaving flowers and notes at Ling Ling’s cage.

The Ueno Zoo is hoping to get pandas on loan at least. Unfortunatly, it’s not like there are many pandas to go around–only 1,600 of them live outside of zoos. Their native environment is in China in Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces. [see AP article]

Devra G. Kleiman, the author of the Smithsonian article, spent a long time studying pandas, both in the wild and in zoos, and provides a detailed account of their habits and habitat, including mating habits which may explain why Ling Ling never got lucky in love with pandas. In people love, he hit pay dirt.

When science meets load management: A new optimized boarding process

by Grant Martin on

Have you ever wondered why airlines board their planes in such strange order or in zones? The thought is that it’s the fastest way to get the passengers onto the plane and seated to ensure the fastest departure. But has anyone really analyzed the process? One scientist at Fermilab in Illinois decided that it was time — Jason Steffen recently ran a Monte Carlo Simulation on the boarding process and published his paper in Nature.

The model basically assumes that the most time taken while boarding is in the process of loading one’s luggage into the overhead compartment. Since you can’t do that when you’re stacked tightly into an aisle or another person from your zone is loading his or her luggage, things slow down. But by boarding groups of people who sit several rows apart from one another, the time it takes to load luggage and sit down is dramatically reduced.

This is contrary to the current belief held by many airlines that boarding by zones from back to front is the fastest. If you think about it, when you get to your row and there are five other people jockeying around their rollaboards, it kind of makes sense, right?

Interestingly, Steffen found that by boarding in a completely random order, the process wasn’t that bad and was even an improvement over boarding from back to front. In that situation the random placement of passengers in the line of people means that there is a higher probability of having space to load your bag when you get to your seat.

Perhaps that’s why Northwest Airlines abolished their method of loading zones a couple of years back and it’s now a complete free-for-all at the gate.

I won’t take up more frontpage space with the details, but if you’d like to read my favorite comment in the ensuing underground discussions, continue on. And don’t forget to read the full journal article here.”In this case, the author apparently considered people as behaving as discrete, random particles. I’m not sure if that would be the best basis of a model, since the motion of individuals in close proximity to each other are affected by the motions of their nearest neighbors. That effect is often modeled as a finite reaction time, or signal speed, among particles (people) modeled as a continuum. Cars on a highway are also modeled that way, with the net result that a the cars behave as a predominantly one-dimensional supersonic compressible fluid, exhibiting analogous behavior to a decrease in flow area (e.g. lanes ending and the flow slowing), increases in in duct area (adding an extra lane which generates in increase in speed), shocks (accidents), expansions (light turning green)… I point this out because an interesting continuum model, motivated by the interesting work by the author of the cited work, may be formulated to further refine and deal with boarding-time predictions based on different schemes.” — UAL Traveler via Flyertalk

Obviously.

Prostitution in Monkeyland?

by Abha Malpani on

If anyone says that they don’t stop in their tracks when they see animals mating (out of sheer curiosity, of course), they are probably lying.

When I was in India on a school trek, I remember seeing a chameleon getting it on with another and it changed colors in the process! It’s not something you see often, and I personally think it’s fascinating.

But, who would have thought that paying for sex extends to the animal kingdom?

According to the Discovery Channel, evidence has been found that male monkeys “pay” for sex by untangling and cleaning dirt and parasites from the fur of the females. The higher the ratio of male to female monkeys, the more grooming the male monkeys need to do to get their sex-life going. This process can last from a few seconds up to half-an-hour and turns the monkeys on. Scientists are guessing that this is how foreplay in humans developed. Also, it seems that materialism is part of primate social life as well: the higher status monkeys don’t have to work as hard as lower status monkeys have to for sex.

The research was conducted in Indonesia from 2003-2005 where the 243 grooming sessions of long-tailed macaques were analyzed.

Although we evolved from these animals, you hardly imagine that the prostitution and materialism of humans also have roots in our animal ancestors.

Australia: Expert nature manipulators?

by Abha Malpani on

Australia is one of the most naturally beautiful places I have been to, specifically because I see it as nature in its most untainted form.

The country has the largest and most diverse national park systems in the world, that covers over 24 million hectares of land.

I lived in Australia for 3-years and what I noted more than anything was how most Australians love being one with nature: traveling, diving, the wilderness, being outside, camping, and generally have enormous respect for the environment.

This is why I find it partly ingenious and partly scandalous that the Australian government has invested AU$10 million to work on a technology to form new rain clouds from blue skies by generating ions in the atmosphere.

This new ionization system uses a ground-based device to attract water molecules that then condense and generate heat; this apparently gives rise to an atmospheric condition where clouds are formed naturally.

Sure, many parts of are in dire need of rain, and a different form of rainmaking technology has been in use in Tasmania and the Snowy Mountains for years. Although the system seems natural, and is for no other reason but to provide water where deficient for obvious reasons, it disturbs me to see expertise in manipulating nature.
Australia tops the list of naturally beautiful destinations, but if they mess with nature and “create” environments for whatever reason, surely that would tamper with the fundamental reason as to why they are beautiful in the first place, no?