Samwise rides again

http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.jpg

An oldie, but a goldie …

engineer

• noun 1 a person qualified in engineering. 2 a person who maintains or controls an engine or machine. 3 a person who skilfully originates something.

• verb 1 design and build. 2 contrive to bring about.

From MSNBC …

Eighteen-year-old Abey is unpredictable, has a temper and let his side down badly on Thursday when he lost focus on his polo game in southern Sri Lanka and hospitalized two of his teammates.

The four-ton elephant threw off an American player as well as the Sri Lankan rider directing Abey as the island’s sixth annual elephant polo tournament got under way, rampaging off the field and crushing the Spanish team’s minibus with his head.

Hmmmm … not one for good sportsmanship then ?

Spectators rushed out of the enclosure next to the ramparts of a historic 17th Century Dutch Fort in the southern port town of Galle as Abey repeatedly butted the minibus, breaking its windows and wrecking its bodywork.

Wonder if the insurance covers acts-of-elephant ?

A vet clutched a tranquilizer dart rifle nearby as trainers tried to control him with sharp sticks and stones.

“I’m not playing again. It’s not safe,” said visiting American player Courtney Zenz after watching her teammate thrown from the back of the elephant and dangling in the air, her leg stuck in a stirrup.

Elephants are revered in Sri Lanka and used at Buddhist religious ceremonies and local festivals — the main day job for most of the polo-playing elephants chosen from among 110 domesticated animals across the island.

The rest of the Sri Lanka’s 3,500-4,000 elephants are wild, roaming in scrub jungle and wildlife parks, and officials are striving to tackle a human-elephant conflict in rural areas, where farmers shoot dead elephants to protect their crops.

I assume they mean the farmers shoot the elephants dead, not that they shoot dead elephants.

In 2006 around 150 elephants were killed and 50 humans were trampled or slammed to death as the animals strayed into villages scavenging for food

Visiting Thai elephant conservation expert Prasop Tipprasert says putting the animals to work can help educate the civilian population and pay for costly upkeep, but is not convinced polo is the answer.

and I feel I’ve got to include this quote …

“Doing any sport is always a risk. Let’s go surfing.”

IPSec has a reputation for being a pain to set up, however this article from Security Focus discusses how to set up IPSec in around four minutes using OpenBSD.

It might however take you more than four minutes to read the article, but that is beside the point.

For reference see ipsecctl(8) and ipsec.conf(5).

Let the good times roll.

UPDATE : 0 to IPSEC in 4 minutes (To a Cisco!)

From the Beeb …

A female zookeeper has died after being mauled by a jaguar at Denver Zoo in the United States

The zookeeper, who was not named, was attacked inside the jaguar’s enclosure on Saturday morning, prompting armed employees to rush to her aid.

They shot and killed the animal after it threatened them, and the zoo was closed after the incident.

The jaguar, a six-year-old male named Jorge weighing 140lbs (64kg), came to Denver Zoo from Bolivia in 2005.

An investigation is under way to determine how the mauling occurred.

The zookeeper was taken to hospital where she died of her injuries.

CanSpice points us to this story on CBC ….

A female moose with two calves attacked a 60-year-old woman while she was walking her dog. The woman was taken to hospital with minor injuries while her dog, a cocker spaniel, was so badly injured that it had to be euthanized.

Earlier this month, a moose with calves chased a man in a residential neighborhood that backs onto a hillside.

“We’ve advised people to bring in their dogs and to just be aware if they’re out walking,” Constable Gary Godwin told CBC Radio.

Students at Pinewood Elementary School, near the location of Thursday’s attack, were kept inside during recess.

Conservation officers are now looking for the moose, but have not yet determined what they’ll do with them. They say a moose protecting her calves can be dangerous — even deadly.

From Aunty …

The girl was posing for photographs with the tiger when it was startled by camera flashes and pulled the girl’s head into its mouth

Staff beat the tiger until it released the girl, but she had suffered a crushed skull and died in hospital.

The zoo has stopped allowing visitors to pose with its tigers for a charge of $2 (£1)

From the BeeBee Cee …

A Chinese man has reportedly been killed and eaten by six bears in Shulan, Jilin province.

Han Shigen earned a living by extracting bile from the gall bladders of his captive live bears

He was attacked on Monday morning while cleaning the animals’ cage

the animals were so enraged that two hours passed before it was deemed safe enough to remove his body.

Many parts of the bear, including the brain and spinal cord, have long been used in traditional Chinese medicine.

The most coveted part is the bile within the gall bladder, which can often be more expensive that the equivalent weight of narcotics.

Bear bile can fetch an estimated $1,000 per kilo in Asian markets.

The bile is extracted in an excruciatingly painful process which involves slicing into the animal’s flesh and “milking” the substance with a tube.

The bile is then used for everything from hair shampoo to wine, as well as medicinal treatments for various intestinal and cardiac-related complaints.

From the National Geographic …

No fewer than 22 times, researchers documented wild chimpanzees on an African savanna fashioning sticks into “spears” to hunt small primates called lesser bush babies.

In each case a chimpanzee modified a branch by breaking off one or two ends and, frequently, using its teeth to sharpen the stick. The ape then jabbed the spear into hollows in tree trunks where bush babies sleep.

Chimpanzees are well-known toolmakers. In the 1960s primatologist Jane Goodall famously observed chimps using sticks to fish termites out of mounds.

“But we’ve never discovered chimp populations that made the cognitive leap to put those two [skills] together and use weapons to assist in their hunting,” Stanford said.

“And clearly this is what these guys are doing.”

What makes the discovery all the more remarkable, project leader Pruetz said, is who the hunters are: predominantly mature females and immatures—youngsters between about two and ten years old.

“We don’t think of chimpanzee hunting in terms of the females and immatures,” she said.

The new finding shows that females and immatures do hunt. It also suggests that females played a role in the evolution of tool use and hunting among early human ancestral species, she added.

Chimpanzees are modern humans’ closest living relatives.

The researchers refer to the tools as spears. Pruetz said they differ from throwing spears, in the sense that they are jabbed into tree trunks and branches, not tossed.

USC’s Stanford said the word “spear” is an overstatement that makes the chimpanzees sound too much like early humans.

He prefers “bludgeon.”

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UPDATE : from the BBC …

Scientists in Scotland have discovered that female chimpanzees can be just as violent as their male counterparts.

The St Andrews University psychologists found examples of female chimps killing the offspring of incoming mothers, previously regarded as a male trait.

The belief was that male and females differed greatly in nature but the psychologists found that if the chimps’ resources come under threat, the females could become just as aggressive as males.

While observing chimps in the Sonso community, the researchers came across three examples of female apes killing the offspring of incoming mothers.

One attack was so violent that a baby chimp’s head was bitten off.

Simon Townsend, who led the study, said: “It’s true that males are much more often seen to engage in extreme physical violence than females, and this has led to the notion of violent and demonic males in contrast to quite peaceful females.

“However, our research shows that, under the right socio-ecological circumstances, these chimp gender stereotypes collapse completely.

“If their resources are under threat, females can become just as violently aggressive as males.”

an increase of immigrant females entering the Sonso community had put pressure on food and mate resources, which had caused the violence.

“It is impossible to predict when another instance may occur,”

Minute

/minyoot/

• adjective (minutest) 1 extremely small. 2 precise and meticulous.

— ORIGIN Latin minutus ‘lessened, made small’.

/minit/

• noun 1 a period of time equal to sixty seconds or a sixtieth of an hour. 2 (a minute) informal a very short time. 3 (also arc minute or minute of arc) a sixtieth of a degree of angular measurement.

— ORIGIN from Latin pars minuta prima ‘first very small part’.

Got to love that English language.