Random Thursday – The Friday Edition

Scattershooting while attempting to deal with the psychic fallout from the realization that Toni Basil is 67 years old.

• Who says Facebook is a waste of time? I just learned a new word by looking at it: zygodactyl. What’s it mean? Well, maybe you should be using Facebook, too. No, wait…that just takes up your valuable blog-reading time. Zygodactyl refers to a bird’s foot that has two toes facing forward and two facing backwards. Such a bird might not know if it’s coming or going, but then neither would a predator. What’s a common zygodactyl (around here, anyway)? Try our good friend, the roadrunner.
• Just heard on The Rachel Ray Show (yeah, so what?) that 2011 is going to be the Year of the Hot Dog. According to her website, “artisanal hot dogs” will be all the rage this year. I applaud that prediction as a decked-out hot dog is surely one example of God’s love. However, I’m not sure that Ms. Ray and I courting the same canine cuisine if she thinks salmon can ever be a part of a real dog.
• The interwebz and morning shows are abuzz about the gorilla that “walks like a man.” Here’s the vid:

  This was later proven to be a case of mistaken identity, after Russell Crowe admitted to getting a “little hammered” and finding himself in an unfamiliar setting. No, just kidding; this is simply the inevitable evolution of the species. It won’t be long before this gorilla is leaving his dirty clothes on the bedroom floor, laughing at animated sitcoms, and scratching himself in public. Oh, wait…

• “Was Genghis Khan history’s greenest conqueror?” According to this article, Mr. Khan’s gentle sweep across most of the globe resulted in the return of a bunch of previously tilled and cultivated land to oxygen-restoring forests, making the entire world breathe a little easier. How did he do it, and are there any lessons we can learn for today’s world? Yes, and yes. The approach is simple: he killed approximately 40 million humans, which was a rather significant percentage of the world’s population at that time. The lesson is equally clear: never, EVER look at a Greenpeace “warrior” in quite the same light again. (Link via Neatorama)
• It’s been reported that streaming videos from Netflix consumes up to 20% of US internet bandwidth during peak hours. This doesn’t just make Netflix the big dog of online media delivery, but also makes it a valuable source of data regarding the health and vigor of the web in general. And thus when the company publishes a graph showing the performance of sixteen major internet service providers based on how well they deliver data, we probably need to pay attention. [Click here to jump directly to the big honking graph if you don’t care about methodology or caveats and just want to see how your old-and-busted cable provider is doing.] The Netflix chart shows a rolling three-month average of kilobits-per-second. I was a little surprised to see that our provider, Suddenlink, was consistently the third or fourth fastest provider. Interestingly, none of the providers could actually deliver the bandwidth needed to stream Netflix’s HD movies at full resolution. So, when you hear claims from any ISP about its streaming HD content, take it with a large grain of salt. [Link via Subtraction]
• Oh, and by the way, Netflix – thanks for the almost undecipherable chart. Seriously, I had to download the PNG, open it in Photoshop, and use the Eyedropper tool to confirm which red line went with which provider. Colorblind users might as well be dogs. The lesson here is Genghis Khan-simple: if you need to use more than one shade of the same color in a graph, then color should not be the only way to identify the data plot. Use on-graph labels, or tic marks or…something.

We’ll close with this super-slo-mo video of a Shaolin monk throwing a needle through a pane of glass. This apparently is an indication of the level of spirituality the monk has achieved. I wonder if our church’s pulpit committee thought about employing this test to weed out candidates for our recently-filled pastor’s slot? At the very least, they could have tested for the ability to throw a camel through the eye of a needle…