DMC-FX7
ƒ/2.8
5.8 mm
1/8
200
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
24 responses to “What’s That? (49)”
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I was lucky… I just happened to see it posted moments after Steve put it there. The reason I thought it might be a dog was because the photo was taken at 11:29pm and I thought what animal would be around Steve at that time of night? The camera or I might be totally off though.
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LOL Rocketeer,
Very deductive reasoning and such attention to small details like a time stamp!
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OK… so both the camera and I were half wrong.
How about the eye of a squirrel, maybe a dead one?
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Thinking hard…. grunt…(issuing smoke from my helmet)… how about an echidna, or a spiney anteater… they have trouble cooling off (no sweat) and they sniff out their prey.
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Bingo BenODen! It is a sleeping boar (but not wild). The "landspeed record" was just a Rocketeer reference. The “no sweat” and “sniff out” references were the clues.
Pigs lack sweat glands, so they wallow in the mud to cool off. I wonder if the lack of sweat glands helps them avoid acne on their unwashed faces? 😉
They are also good sniffers: “Pigs have an excellent sense of smell, in many European countries they are used in the hunting of truffles as they are said to smell like the genitalia of a boar.” (wikipedia) Hmmm… You know… some human had to make that discovery….
I have also learned, from the optical tweezer sperm sorting done by Arryx, that hogs have a lot of sperm, an evolutionary advantage in the face of polyandry. In a single engagement, they produce a 8 billion sperm… in a pint of semen… with orgasms that can last 30 minutes.
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Yes, quite wrong. 😀
Interesting technology Steve! Use in human selection will be widely adopted in China once the cost gets low enough, I suspect. They still have the growth curbs on, right? In any case, in some some countries people will select for more women than men, in others, more men than women, and that’s gotta have an effect on population growth, right?
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Dude… a fine word. I’m glad that we were here for this new flickr-induced experience.
Ben: You’d like Gregory Stock’s Redesiging Humans.
I blogged a bit about it: Society will likely try to curtail “genetic free speech” as it applies to human germ line engineering, and thereby curtail the evolution of evolvability. Lessig predicts that we will recapitulate the 200-year debate about the First Amendment to the Constitution. Pressures to curtail free genetic expression will focus on the dangers of “bad speech”, and others will argue that good genetic expression will crowd out the bad. Artificial chromosomes (whereby children can decide whether to accept genetic enhancements when they become adults) can decouple the debate about parental control. And, with a touch of irony, China may lead the charge.
Many of us subconsciously cling to the selfish notion that humanity is the endpoint of evolution. In the debates about machine intelligence and genetic enhancements, there is a common and deeply rooted fear about being surpassed – in our lifetime. But, when framed as a question of parenthood (would you want your great grandchild to be smarter and healthier than you?), the emotion often shifts from a selfish sense of supremacy to a universal human search for symbolic immortality. (original)
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