post something Quite Interesting..

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That's alright, the whole system seems a mess, I don't think anyone really understands it. It could be ESA as I think they are trying to condense a lot of the benefits, supposedly making it simpler.

I found this interesting. The music with the end credits though is cringe worthy but the documentary itself is well worth viewing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2THFvUpu7Y[/youtube]

Here are some pictures to accompany my post:



Photo of the original fossil. The photo underneath has the foetus highlighted.



Reconstructed size comparison between mother and baby.



Reconstruction of Polycotylus birth.

Evidence on the unborn plesiosaur indicates it was still in the foetal stage as the bones had not yet fully developed, especially around the skull area.

C is for cookie, thats good enough for me.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that all of the ancient aquatic saurians are gone; they must have been so graceful! I wonder how intelligent they were, or if they were just instinctive, like crocodiles.....

Sylkat

I imagine they would have had quite mammalian behaviours, as they gave birth to live young, often one at a time, so they would have invested lots of parental care and the babies would have probably grown up with lots of playing behaviour, like chasing with other pups in the group, which would be good practice for evasive manoeuvres from predatory animals. (I like how they're called 'pups', it's weird considering they're reptiles).
And they would have had very good co-ordination skills too, which I consider a form of intelligence, perhaps not in the conventional sense, but intelligence all the same as it requires a lot of complex brain power to accomplish. They needed this to swim in their unique way and to find the right method of attack when targeting schools of fish.

I imagine plesiosaurs in particular to be rather like dolphins and whales in terms of behaviour and personality. Perhaps not with quite the same range of communication skills, but still quite intelligent animals.

I agree they would have been so elegant in the water. It's seems so wrong when I see depictions of them as scary sea monster types, I view them in a much more graceful way than that, and I think they deserve it.

Perhaps the larger pliosaurs and mosasaurs were more instinctive in their behaviours though, like a crocodilian they might have simply seen movement and attacked first, then asked questions later, so to speak. Then again, if they bore live young, who knows? They might have had more of a social structure then we think?

Not all the ancient aquatic saurians are gone though, we still have the turtles, and they haven't changed too much in millions of years. They're obviously doing something right.

Dear Rabbitears, if you go to 'News And Current Events', Shrox has posted a picture of Canada's new 25 cent coin, which has a glow-in-the -dark dinosaur on it
A Pachyrhino something.....

Sylkat

That coin was great! Thanks for the mention Sylkittykat.

They had one with a Para on it once, saw it on Ebay but it cost loads.... I like Canada.

Just a quick hit'n'run..
The film usual suspects actually contains it's own spoiler, within minutes it's there but I suspect it's not well-known, even amongst fans

And I'm not gonna say either, leastways not yet, to avoid spoiling and also to pose another challenge for... well.. Nobody, in all likelihood.
Though I'd be madly impressed if somebody gets it

Memorable Media Reports

"Sterility may be inherited." - The Rural Pacific Press

"The evening of clairvoyance on Tuesday December 4 at 7p.m. has been cancelled owing to unforeseen circumstances." - East Kent Times

Dear Rabbitears, Those were funny!
More, please!

Sylkat

Hehe nice one Usagi...


Qi fact of the day says; approximately 20million golf balls are lost in water hazards on british golf courses each year.

Internal energy is the sum of temperature (ke) and phase (pe) conditions.
Steam and liquid water molecules at 100 degrees have equal kinetic energies.
Degrees Kelvin (absolute temp.) Is equal to zero (0) degrees Celsius.
Temperature measures the average kinetic energy of the molecules.
Phase changes are due to potential energy changes.
Internal energy always flows from an object at higher temperature to one of lower temperature.

Thanks Joker.
I Might have to re-read that one..

in 1986, sonic solutions [an offshoot of george lucas' droid works] was the first firm to market NONOISE [tm] digital noise reduction/audio restoration services/equipment, with the digidesign/mac centeris 650 platform and their proprietary protools augmented digital tools. for the first time, deeply embedded grunge/crackle/grotzyl could not only be suppressed but actually removed, from the essential sound quality of archival recorded audio materials, be they on disc or tape or wire media. when i first read about this in [now defunct] high fidelity magazine in 1987, and read about how much it cost [$40k plus the cost of a mac centeris 650 and ancillaries, in 1987 dollars] i both salivated over having it for myself to use on my collection of old flat friends and noisy tapes, but also despaired of ever being able to afford it save for winning big on the lotto. but at the present day there is a whole range of consumer-level equipment/software available that can do all the NONOISE system could do and even more, such as erasing extraneous sounds from live recordings, such as coughs, squeaking chairs, car horns and such, via the process of spectral retouching. the next frontier, is wow/flutter correction, and a company with a product called CAPSTAN can take a warbly old recording and via a proprietary automatic intelligent process, straighten out all the pitch variations caused by off-center pressings and unevenly stretched mylar recording tape, and make it sound new again. but alas, their software costs nearly $5k, so expensive that they rent it out for $200 a day. i wish i had it. i can do a little of this manually via soundforge's pitch correction algorithm, but the automatic CAPSTAN process would be so much better.

Here is another one you might like.

Lambert's laws (J.H. Lambert)

Lambert's first law
The illuminance on a surface illuminated by light falling on it perpendicularly from a point source is proportional to the inverse square of the distance between the surface and the source.

Lambert's second law
If the rays meet the surface at an angle, then the illuminance is proportional to the cosine of the angle with the normal.

Lambert's third law
The luminous intensity of light decreases exponentially with distance as it travels through an absorbing medium.