Bowerbird
The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is the extraordinarily complex behavior of males, which is to build a bower to attract mates. Depending on the species, the bower ranges from a circle of cleared earth with a small pile of twigs in the center to a complex and highly decorated structure of sticks and leaves — usually shaped like a walkway, a small hut or a maypole — into and around which the male places a variety of objects he has collected. These objects — usually strikingly blue in hue — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items or pieces of glass. The bird spends hours carefully sorting and arranging his collection, with each object in a specific place; if an object is moved while the bowerbird is away he will put it back in its place. No two bowers are the same, and the collection of objects reflects the personal taste of each bird and its ability to procure unusual and rare items (going as far as stealing them from neighboring bowers). At mating time, the female will go from bower to bower, watching as the male owner conducts an often elaborate mating ritual and inspecting the quality of the bower. Many females end up selecting the same male, and many underperforming males are left without mates.
In a striking example of what is known as the “transfer effect,” bowerbird species that build the most elaborate bowers are dull in color and show little variation between male and female, whereas in bowerbird species with less elaborate bowers the males have bright plumage. Presumably, evolution has “transferred” the reproductive benefits of bright male plumage (common among polygamous birds) to elaborate bowers, allowing males to display their fitness by means other than physical characteristics that would appear to attract predation.
This complex mating behavior, with highly valued types and colors/decorations that in many species vary in attractiveness from year to year like fashion trends, has led some researchers to regard the bowerbirds as the most advanced of any species of bird. It also provides some of the most compelling evidence that the extended phenotype of a species can play a role in sexual selection and indeed act as a powerful mechanism to shape its evolution, as seems to be the case for humans.
Bowerbird - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matlab Upazila
Matlab is an Upazila of Chandpur District in the Division of Chittagong, Bangladesh.
Matlab is located at 23.3500° N 90.7083° E . It has 76,266 registered housing units and a total land area 409.22 km².
Matlab Upazila - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
How to find lost devices
If you’ve every played with an embedded network device, such as a WTR54G or a slug, you may have lost your device on the network, and not known what IP address it had. I recently had the same happen to me at work, and I discovered the -b flag to the ping command, to allow your computer to broadcast a ping. All computers that receive the broadcast ping are supposed to reply to the ping, so you can easily find all devices on your subnet. Simply use a command along the lines of the following:
ping -b 192.168.1.255
And all devices on the 192.168.1.x subnet will receive the ping.
VU Meter
A VU meter is often included in analog audio equipment to display a signal level in Volume Units.
It is intentionally a “slow” measurement, averaging out peaks and troughs of short duration to reflect the perceived loudness of the material. It was originally developed in 1939 by the combined effort of Bell Labs and broadcasters CBS and NBC, for measuring and standardizing the levels of telephone lines. The instrument used to measure VU is called the volume indicator (VI) instrument. Most users ignore this and call it a VU meter.
Volume Unit VU defined: The reading of the volume indicator shall be 0 VU when it is connected to a 600-ohm resistance in which is flowing one milliwatt of sine-wave power at 1000 cycles per second.
The typical VU scale is from −20 to 3. The rise and fall times of the meter are both 300 milliseconds, meaning that if a constant sine wave of amplitude 0 VU is applied suddenly, the meter will take 300 milliseconds to reach the 0 on the scale. It behaves as a full-wave averaging instrument, and is not optimal for measuring peak levels.
Richard Feynman Needs His Orange Juice
For you folks in RSS readers, I linked to the following video Richard Feynman playing bongos [via]
Google Map Overlays
This Google Maps mashup lets you see an outline of one part of the world overlayed on another part of the world. For example, you can sketch an outline of California in the “Reference Map” below, and then overlay the outline over Japan in the “Comparison Map.” Whatever you draw in the top map stays centered in the bottom map.
Basically, this is a totally awesome way to compare geographic locations in terms of area, visually.