Your humble and overworked reporter has to set things right on certain occasions, so we here at the Perspective Research Department, along with the staff at Naked News, are going to provide a regular feature here on BlogsCanada.ca called…………………………, LET’S GET THINGS BACK INTO PERSPECTIVE HERE!
We start with a letter I had to send to the London Free Press this morning!
Sir:
I normally try and be a little bit diplomatic, (no matter how hard that
is for me) but this time I have to tell it like it is.Regarding Music London’s proposal for a concert hall in downtown London, , I’m sure they have read the numerous reports that state venues of this type need to seat at least two thousand people to be economically viable. (That’s 2000!)
With this in mind what “idiot” came up with the idea of seating 1400 people?
Am I nuts, or are they?
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On a side note here, what is it with “spell-check?” …………….. It just told me I spelled my name wrong!!!!!
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I just found out that the household limit for animals in London is three dogs or eight cats!
Why would people have to be told this?
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Just found out the “word-find” and “crossword” puzzles in the paper had their font sizes reduced!
Naturally, since most of these readers are elderly, they have had a whole bunch of complaints in the past few days.
Whose idea was this?
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Kitchener?Waterloo and London are always competing for stuff since
they are the major centers in S.W. Ontario, and about the same size (1/2
million) etc. etc.London is really pushing for high speed rail to T.O., but since K/W is half the distance and already has GO service, they are trying to scuttle London’s bid!
All’s fair in love and war, I guess!
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Remember the nut who cut off a guy’s head on a Greyhound bus a few years back?
Well, a guy who witnessed this …………………, just committed suicide!
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In the newly released film, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” humans and apes vie for dominance after a virus has made apes hyperintelligent while wiping out most humans.
But though apes riding horses, reading and writing in English, and hunting like Stone Age humans is probably far-fetched, the idea of another species or life form dominating the planet isn’t, scientists say. In fact, depending on how dominance is defined, other creatures may already be in charge, experts say.
With humans around, it’s very difficult for another superintelligent
species to evolve, said Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleobiologist at the
University of Leicester.
“Humans have been quite good at removing the competition,” Zalasiewicz told Live Science.
Over several million years of evolution, modern humans have already
outcompeted several primates and other human species, such as
Denisovans, hobbitlike creatures dubbed Homo floresiensis, and
Neanderthals, he said.But assuming humans had managed to kill themselves off with famine, plague, war or climate change, it could take many millions of years for a new species to evolve the intelligence and abilities to dominate the Earth. After all, creatures as intelligent as humans only evolved once in the nearly 3.5 billion years of life on the planet, Zalasiewicz said.
Rats, ubiquitous pests that live on virtually every scrap of land on the planet, are already intelligent and have a highly evolved social structure. In many millions of years, oversized rats could become a hyperintelligent species that could rule the Earth. Pigs, too, have complex social structures and a high level of intelligence, Zalasiewicz said. If they evolved an ability to use tools and continued to evolve intelligence over millions of years, they could conceivably take over the planet, he said.
But realistically, the biggest threat to humans is not a naturally evolving creature, but rather artificial intelligence, he said. “If something else intelligent arises, it will be electronic and [we'll have] made it,” Zalasiewicz said.
Researchers recently reported that a machine had passed the Turing Test, exhibiting behavior that could pass as “human.” (In the Turing Test, if a human interviewer cannot tell the difference between responses from a machine and a human, then the machine is said to show intelligent behavior.) And futurist Ray Kurzweil has long predicted that the singularity, a hypothetical point when machine intelligence overtakes human smarts, will be here by 2045.
BUT!
On some level, humans don’t dominate the Earth now.
Bacteria beat out humans in many ways, said Robert J. Sternberg, a professor of human development at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
“Humans only imagine they dominate the Earth. Bacteria dominate the Earth,” Sternberg wrote in an email to Live Science. “There are infinitely more of them — well, almost — than there are of us. Much of our own weight is bacterial. They reproduce faster and they mutate faster. They have been around far longer than we have been and they will be around after we are gone.”
And bacteria aren’t the only contenders for world domination.
“Ants already control the planet,” said Mark W. Moffett, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and author of “Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions” (University of California Press, 2011). “They just do it under our feet.”
For instance, there are many more ants than there are humans, and their total weight, or biomass, equals or exceeds that of humans, Moffett said.
They also use traditional military rules of engagement to wage war.
For instance, they rely on “shock and awe,” in essence swarming their
enemies with sheer numbers to overcome them. Ants also throw the
weakest, scrawniest members of the colony out front while keeping their
“supersoldier” ants to the rear, just as the front lines in many battles
are made up of the least trained and most poorly equipped soldiers,
Moffett said.This strategy has proven incredibly successful.
For instance, individual African army ants may not be scary on their own, but they create swarms that are 100 feet (30.5 meters) long and millions-strong. With their little bladelike teeth, they can swarm and devour a tethered cow — or potentially an unattended human baby — in minutes, he said.
“There is a reason why women in equatorial Africa carry babies on their back and don’t put them in a crib,” Moffett told Live Science.
The Argentine Ant first hitched a train ride to California in 1910. Now, a supercolony stretches across most of California, and is waging all-out war to expand its turf with another supercolony in Mexico, he said.
And while any one ant isn’t all that intelligent, they can still solve extraordinary problems with their hive mind, Moffett said.
“Individual ants are the equivalent to the neurons in your brain — each one doesn’t have a lot to say but in combination they can get a lot of things done,” Moffett said.
http://www.livescience.com/46866-planet-apes-next-dominant-species.html
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Speaking of BUGS!
A Florida man may be the first person to become infected with the mosquito-borne virus chikungunya within the United States or Canada, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today (July 17).
The virus, which causes debilitating fever and severe joint
pain, has been circulating in the Caribbean for the past few months,
resulting in several thousands of infections.
There have been cases of infection, but until today, all of them were
reported in people who had acquired the virus during travels abroad.“The arrival of chikungunya virus, first in the tropical Americas and now in the United States, underscores the risks posed by this and other exotic pathogens,” Roger Nasci, chief of the CDC’s Arboviral Diseases Branch, said in a statement.
(Folks, I hope this disease doesn’t become too common …………………., because it’s a son-of-a-bitch to spell!)
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Just read this morning that for the final season of “Two and a Half Men” Waldon and Alan get married (even though they’re NOT gay) and adopt a kid!
Two and a half men has come full circle!
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And finally: Our “Asshole of the Day!”
Officers say 29-year-old Michael Harp asked to make a call on his
cellphone Tuesday afternoon while being booked in Corbin. A short time
later, police say, a pizza delivery driver showed up to deliver to
“Officer Wilson,” the name of the officer who arrested Harp.Harp now faces additional charges including theft of identity, theft by deception, and impersonating a police officer. Jail records did not list an attorney for him.
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/2014/07/17/man-orders-pizza-police-station-kentucky/12811643/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+firstcoastnews%2Fstrange+%28Firstcoastnews.com+Strange+and+Unusual%29
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