Elephant Painting

Friday, March 28, 2008

I watched this video of an elephant painting a “self portrait“. It's really quite something — if you don't have patience, skip to the end to see the image.

That said, not that elephants aren't incredibly intelligent and self-aware animals, but this is actually a remarkable feat of animal training, not of independent artistic impression (I'm reminded of a book I greatly enjoyed, Why Cats Paint)… I watched some other videos and all the elephants repeatedly create the same paintings. Impressive, but not quite as exciting.

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Wisest Hot Dog Around

Friday, March 28, 2008

Not sure where I'm going to take this, I was just killing time…

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I got so high today…

Thursday, March 27, 2008

…as in high in the air.

I've been there way too many times, but holy crap is the office impressive that I had a meeting in today. It's like the top eleven stories of a major skyscraper, with a giant double spiral staircase running through the whole thing and the second largest private art collection in Canada. Right out of Devil's Advocate or something… Maybe I should have become a lawyer? I do remember being very impressed with the view from my uncle's firm when I was a kid (one of the big Bay Street towers)…

Anyway, I saw the coolest thing on eBay… a steam powered sportscar (which you can read about here). I read a bit more about it in the steam car forums and it's quite remarkable — the owner converted a VW engine to run on steam. Very interesting!

Anyway, I was reading about Doble Steam Cars which were made until the 1930s, and some of the stats were quite impressive… They had a 2400km range, got mileage that was about the same as IC cars, was almost silent and produced virtually no pollution, could do over 160kph, and by some accounts the 5500lb cars (with engines producing 1000 ft/lb of torque) could accelerate as fast as a modern sports car… Apparently BMW and others are investigating steam engines again as a superior technology.
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Quack

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

So I know that my ice age entry from a few days ago is pretty shady science, but on a “misinterpreting short term chaos for long term trends” line of thinking, it's really something to see it still pouring snow here at the end of March. I mean, I know that when I was a kid it started snowing on Halloween, and would generally be warm enough for my brother and his friends to stomp through the swamp at the end April for his birthday, so I shouldn't be surprised at this length of winter, but it seems like that's a thing of the past. Nice to see it isn't.

I have really fond memories of growing up in the country… We had a big farm on the lake with springs, marshland, forests, and fields, and my brother and I had relatively free reign to explore. I regret Nefarious not having that, but at the same time, playing with the ducks at the park is pretty fun.

We saw an unpleasant reality of life being illustrated this evening when we watched this duck, which had a broken foot, hop around sadly as other ducks continuously ran up to it and bit it… Even ducks have an instinct to kill off the weak I suppose.

Which reminds me… I have another duck to post…

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Trikes

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

I'm totally in love with the crazy raked trikes from Phoenix Trike Works… When I first wanted a trike, I asked a couple custom motorcycle shops about building a trike just like that and no one was interested — they just wanted to do old man style Harley conversions. These are so much nicer I think.

The trike I ended up getting is arguably a little crazier. In the ligher end of things, this little rat landsurf-trike is very cute and looks like tons of fun.

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