Archive for October, 2004

Wikinews and China

The people who built the wonderful Wikipedia are planning another project â€“ Wikinews. From the Wikinews homepage

Wikinews is a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view.

Looking at how aggregators like Google News are willing to suppress stories to keep China happy, this Wiki based news systems looks like a good platform. But how soon before Wikinews and Wikipedia appear on Chinaâ€™s blocking radar, given that it is far easier for people to quickly translate and build localized version of the articles or news stories on a Wiki based system

Funny ice cream eating dog

funny dog, originally uploaded by preetamrai.

Met this ice cream eating dog. This dog is funny. It seems he once tried sake too. Yes, let him eat ice cream and become fat. Then we will eat him.

Homo floresiensis - The little men of Flores

Homo floresiensis skull compared to a modern human skull- newly discovered species of little humans. (pict from ABC news site)

So the stories of dwarves and gnomes are not fantasy after all. Flores, the Indonesian island known for the Komodo dragon was once occupied by 3-feet tall humans. Scientists found skeletal remains of this tiny human species in a cave along with bones of pygmy elephants. This new species is now termed Homo floresiensis. Homo floresiensis lived about 18,000 years back. They were apparently wiped out in a volcanic eruption 12,000 years ago.

From an article about Home Floresiensis on ABC News web:

However Homo erectus got to the island, once it arrived, Brown suggests its generations began to shrink in size. Fossils show that Homo erectus was fairly tall, standing, on average, 5 feet 10 inches. On Flores, due to the limited resources on the 31-square-mile island, smaller versions of the hominin may have survived best, since they would have required less food to survive. This could have led to the evolution of the new, miniature species.

The article goes on to suggest that maybe not all the little people disappeared in the inferno. Some might have survived well until 1500s and had some form of contact with modern humans who moved to islands.

“The stories suggest they lived in caves. The villagers would leave gourds with food out for them to eat, but legend has it these were the guests from hell â€” they’d eat everything, including the gourds!”