Beware of the Cat

Take a close look at that picture. Up that tree is a bear. At the foot of that tree is a cat. Yep, the cat chased the bear up the tree.

The full story was reported on National Geographic, which reported that the cat was about 7 kilos, and was also declawed.

Impressive!

Three-toed Sloth

Doesn't this thing look like a nightmare? I think that if I ever came across something like this at night, I'd freak myself out thinking it was some sort of a deformed human being or something like that.

It's a three-toed sloth. I fell asleep on the couch tonight with the TV on while taking a short break from writing that proposal, and woke up with a start to see the face of one of those things staring out at me from the TV. Not fun.

But those things are cool. I didn't realize that one of these things is an entire ecosystem in and of itself. It's got specialized symbiotic algae that live in its fur (yes, in its fur). And these algae grow nowhere else. And of course, there're specialized insects that live in its fur and eat the algae.

Ugh. Sounds like a bad case of fleas. But isn't God's earth amazing?

Okay, back to work :-).

Stoning in Iraq

The following CNN video is pretty graphic. It depicts a young woman in Iraq being stoned to death for falling in love with a boy.




The amazing thing is that this was done in a very public scene. The film shows the young woman being dragged out from her home, into a public area where lots of men then take part in stoning her to death. Nobody ventures to help, but apparently lots of people are happy to film this on their cell phone cameras. The youtube film itself was filmed on one of these cameras and is therefore (thankfully!) very shaky and of very poor quality.

On the same day that I saw this video, one of our students came by my office to whine about how bad her life was, because of exams and projects. And how she was "almost dying" (in her words).

I didn't slap her or snap at her, but it took an effort.