Out of Pod Experience

TIL: If you go to a festival on the last day, go past the food vendors again just before closing time. You can get some great deals. "Get over here, you won't believe how much food you're going to get." You might end up with an odd combo of food, such as:
-Shrimp kebabs
-Sausage and peppers sandwiches
-Clam chowder
-Fish and chips (sorry, no fish, just a mountain of chips)
-Bean and cheese tostadas (sorry, no guacamole left)
-Chocolate covered pretzels
But what the heck, after a hard day of festivaling, somebody in your crew will eat it.

TIL: Beta testing tablets is the worst.

TIL: that the "German tank problem" is the name given in statistics to the problem of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from a sampling without replacement, and is called this way as the technique was succesfuly applied to estimate the production of German tanks during WW2. A more recent application has allowed to estimate how many Commodore C64 computers were actually manufactured and sold, from sampling the serial numbers of C64s preserved worldwide: 12.5 million units.

TIL: Concentrated hydrogen peroxide will melt flesh.

Hydrogen peroxide will kill most bacteria, and will kill all tissues.

Some bacteria can break it down with an enzyme called peroxidase.

Hydrogen peroxide is best used to get blood off of things, it is like magic.

I learned this a few weeks ago, so it's a bit disingenuous to say TIL, but there is a group of conidial fungi called Arthrobotrys that capture nematodes with these hyphal rings that they can inflate rapidly.

Edit: picture - http://halifaxgardennetwork.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/arthrobotrys-anconia.jpg

Some species of fish are pretty noisy. Especially toad fish and black drum. They live in murky water with low visibility, so the make noise so potential mates can find them.

For most fish, the sonic mechanism is a muscle that vibrates a swim bladder not unlike our vocal cord. The bladder is a gas-filled sac used for buoyancy, but it can also be used as a sort of drum. The toad fish's bladder muscle is the fastest twitching muscle in the world-- 200 times per second. That's faster than a hummingbird's wings.

Here's some fish sounds audio. Not especially beautiful sounds, really.

TIL If you run out of cat food, your cats will eat fish food. And really love it.

Wow. Even I can follow the idea. Interesting that it's mostly Latin-derived languages, but some strategically-placed modern English in as well. Le labor pro crear Interlingua habeva le start in Europa, a Liverpool in 1936 e le fin a New York in 1951, le equipa de linguistas ha extrahite le vocabulario international del linguas europee. Maybe the committee decided on which word from many languages would be most understood by the most people.

In case you didnt know, it´s a well known fact cats , when out of food and hungry can eat humans too no problem, specially if they already infected with Toxoplasmosis :)