Blanket octopus and NO THAT IS NOT A SNEAKY MICHAEL JACKSON REFERENCE
Been way too much celebrity around these parts for comfort lately (not that I’m not grateful for three rt’s from John Cusack this morning) so I thought I’d flush out the pipes with this gorgeous beast, surely as lovely in its own way as Paul Newman in his, although far less likely to send underprivileged kids to camp or manufacture (excellent) salad dressing, and far more likely to serve as an entree in a Greek restaurant.
You think I’m joking, don’t you? You probably think this is some moderately-snazzy, TED-derivative powerpoint dog and pony show, doncha? Well think again, pal, because this is an award-winning microbiology PhD defense from Carleton University, presented as interpretive dance.
I say again:
Behold:
via BMD Love Blog
WE NO HAZ UR BUKKIT DOOD!!!
It’s not all fun and games out there on the deep blue sea.
That’s CCTV footage of the giant cruise ship the Pacific Sun, being shaken up like a snow globe by the powers of wind and water or perhaps something a little more sinister. If you cruise around LiveLeak, Break, or YouTube you can find any number of videos entitled “DEADLY 20 FOOT WAVE” and so on, but really, a 20-foot wave is nothing. For devotees of Cthulhu such as my fine self, we don’t even notice anything under “Cyclopean” unless, that is, it’s non-Euclidean.
Non-Euclidean waves will always have a special place in my heart, as will the HPL geek who wrote this spell-checking program and included the word non-Euclidean therein.
If you’re a sea geek like me, you probably watched, though claimed not to enjoy The Perfect Storm, but of course you had the book years before. And from that book, you probably remember many terrifying oceanic factoids, such as the fact that waves far higher than the theoretically possible maximum of 150 feet are routinely spotted via satellite imaging, and that a rogue wave once blew out the pilothouse windows on the Queen Mary, and further you remember that the pilot house windows on the Queen Mary are – get this – 92 feet above the water line. The wave was so tall that, even at an altitude of 92 feet, it was sufficiently thick and powerful that it crushed steel-framed, reinforced glass.
So yeah, enjoy that cruise vacation.
They're actually saying Iä! Iä! Iä!
I’m pretty sure I’ve done one of these before, but that was from a different company; why would I be the same kind of scientist?
Though your chief goals are the somewhat contradictory aims to rule, and then destroy, the planet Earth, you have a strong grasp of the scientific principles of blowing up things (Explodology). Good luck and please have mercy.
Well, this seems pretty dead-on.
Remember when we brought you the world’s cutest octopus all the way from the frozen waters of Eastern Canada? Isn’t the little fella just adorbz?
Well, now we’ve gone and found you his (literal) polar opposite: an Antipodean octopus so unstoppably noxious that that its poisonous venom flows at will even at sub-zero temperatures.
According to Wired (hey, when did they get on the Cthulhu beat? I WILL NOT BE MUSCLED OUT, YOU CARPETBAGGERS!!!):
“Antarctic octopus venom works at temperatures that would stop other venoms in their tracks,” said biochemist Bryan Fry of the University of Melbourne, who led the expedition…
The venoms are being studied as potential sources of pain-killers, Fry said, because they work on the nervous system. So far, analysis of the venom has revealed two toxins that are new to science.
Ah, but not to us Comparative Folklore majors, eh?
raincoaster 