http://blog.vertebratesilence.com Your standard mixture of news links, half-baked thoughts, and typos Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:26:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Take a guess, how many golf-cart related injuries do you think take place every year in the US? Ten? A hundred? Around a thousand? Nope. According to a Nationwide Children's Hospital study, 2006 saw an estimated 13,411 cases of gold-cart related injuries. 13,411. In 2006. In the US alone. I mean, considering that escalators ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/06/13/golf-cart-related-injuries/ Britain's RSPB, which for the past 60 years has kept records of around 400 pairs engaged in sexual activity at Wytham Woods, Oxford, has found out that great tits cope well with global warming. Really. The full story can be accessed here. http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/05/08/great-what/ Yesterday, I praised the brilliant DAA2ISO program that converts PowerISO's proprietary DAA files into more usable ISO images. Today, I ask if you have ever had problems trying to open a UIF file (MagicISO's proprietary format)? Because if you have, then again look no further than to Luigi Auriemma's collection of ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/20/uif2iso-how-to-convert-uif-files-to-iso/ Ever had the problem of finding yourself faced with a big fat DAA disk image and no PowerISO to open it with, nor any intention of installing the program? I have. Fortunately, there is a handy little tool called DAA2ISO that works marvels. Do take a look at Luigi Auriemma's collection ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/19/daa2iso-how-to-convert-daa-files-to-iso/ Andy Baio has posted an interesting article based on a shared network drive that Infocom used in 1989. Infocom, of course, is/was the company behind such text adventures -- sorry, interactive fiction titles -- as the Zork series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and my personal favourite Planetfall. Baio's article ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/04/18/milliways-the-sequel-to-infocoms-h2g2-that-never-was/ I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for addictive game play. For the past three months or so, I've spent far too much time playing Chain Factor, a Flash based browser game where you drop discs into a grid. I mainly play the "Survival" mode, as its quite ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/02/01/chain-factor-the-most-addictive-game-since-tetris/ If you run a PunBB forum, you know how easy, light and fast it is. On the other hand, you probably also know how vulnerable it is to spam. Once your forum becomes a target, the speed with which spam appears is faster than the speed with which you can ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/01/31/how-to-easily-stop-punbb-spam/ Poor NASA. Just when they got rid of the "Mars face" mystery (see a related Google search) that of course was no mystery at all, another similar potential headache surfaces at Mercury. After all, what else can the following image, taken a few weeks ago by the space agency's Messenger ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2008/01/31/mercurys-lawn-mower-man/ Sometimes I wonder if cats know more about Pavlov and Skinner than they let you to believe. Or, why else would a cat, when you are about to feed it, keep pushing its head against your thighs, as if cuddling you, if not to give you positive reinforcement for your ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2007/10/30/cats-and-behaviorism/ According to a Cornell University study, around 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution. That should be about 7 deaths caused by pollution every ten seconds, if I'm not mistaken. However, perhaps an even more alarming fact presented by the study is that around "57 ... http://blog.vertebratesilence.com/2007/08/14/40-of-deaths-caused-by-pollution/