Quick links to a week’s worth of browsing:

  • Design: flowerlike lightbulb unfurls as it warms up. [via sensory impact]
  • Craziness: every year two Greek monasteries bombard each other with fireworks. [via Nemo Ramjet]
  • Life/art mutual imitation: A British explorer disappears in the Amazon jungle, while looking for a lost city. Attempts to find his remains, and the city he searched for, are complicated by the fact that he kept his travel plans a secret — even to the point of releasing false coordinates. And this around the time that everyone was reading H. Rider Haggard. Just who was fooling who, here? BLDGBLOG has the story.
  • Gadget-lust: a comfy chair mounted on tank treads. For the long trek to the coffee machine, naturally. [via fosfor gadgets]
  • Gadget-lust redux: the coffee machine. Includes the important observation that the coffee apparatus has to be simple enough to be operated by a person who hasn’t had any coffee yet.
  • Bird-brained: I won’t comment without reading the paper, but the blogosphere is aflame about the abilities of starlings to learn non-regular grammars, and the inabilities of the popular press to report this stuff competently. (Exhibits A, B, C.) It’s interesting research, that unfortunately everyone seems to misinterpret (including the Science reviewers of the 2004 paper in which Fitch & Hauser reported related results for tamarin monkeys, who —this is just unattributed gossip, mind you— apparently made them cut descriptions of various control conditions which are essential for ruling out some trivial objections). I sense a post coming on…
  • More bird-brained antics: Language Log has been infected with bird (syntax) flu. (Warning: Psychologists the condition linguists doctors examined suffered first described agree: it’s highly contagious, and the symptoms are bloody awful.)
  • Great potential: a plagiarism contest (phrases or larger, no single-word citations). [via Maud Newton]