Thursday, August 30, 2007

Vietnamese Mossy Frog



Vietnamese Mossy Frog (Theloderma Corticale) is species in Rhacophoridae family. This frog can be found in Vietnam and also, in China. Especially
on the Mao Son and Tam Dao mountain ranges of northern Vietnam.
Natural habitats of this frog are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest, subtropical or tropical moist montanes, intermittent freshwater marches, and rocky areas. But, mostly in rocky cliffs and rocky cavites, he is a fan of it.It has also been observed breeding in tree holes by larval development. Theloderma corticale is classified as data deficient, meaning more data is needed on the species for categorization, by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Theloderma corticale's population trend was unknown at last assessment.
Threats

It is known from two sources, one only reported in the 1930's and the other recently discovered. It has not been recorded at the type locality since it was first collected. It is cryptic and localised, but large series of specimens have been observed/collected at Tam Dao (Orlov, 1997), suggesting that the species may be locally common.
Forest damage in Tam Dao continues to be significant (Birdlife, 2001). Clear cutting at Mao Son has reduced the available habitat to this species. This is one of the few regional frog species for which there is a specific demand in the global pet trade.


Skin of Vietnamese Frog looks like a bunch of moss.Because, the skin's color and texture are amazing. Their skin is colored in various shades of green with black and purple spots and stains. They are covered with numerous tubercles and spines thus providing them with a perfect camouflage.


They actively feed, at night on large insects such as crickets and cockroaches. This is a semi-aquatic species spending much of the time hiding in the water under rocks and floating plants. They will also attach themselves to the crevice on a rock, just above the water appearing to be moss. Their eggs are deposited above the water to protect them from aquatic predators. The eggs hatch in 7 to 14 days with the newly hatched tadpoles dropping from their egg into the water directly below them. Metamorphous from tadpole to frog takes about 3 months.

Many people like to have this frog as a pet. It is a really pretty, indeed. The price of this beautiful frog is about $45-$75 (each).

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Elephant with steel fang

















Elephant Spike, in Canadian zoo "Calgary" had a pretty serious accident- he broke a left fang. Residual half of a fang is fissured almost till jaw. That is menaced to infect tooth's nerve and give Spike awfully aches, maybe even brought him to death. For that reason, zoo's administration choose to build him an unusual denture. In collaboration with Technology Institute in Alberta, two dentures are made of steel. These dentures are 14 kg weighty and costs about 8500 us dollars. although, the second fang was healthy, administration of zoo choose to made both dentures-enable Spike hold the balance. During three-hours operation, patient Spike was a totally "care-free" and sleeping, even he was snoring!

Weird Science Facts











Every year about 98% of atoms in your body are replaced.

At a glance, the Celsius scale makes more sense than the Fahrenheit scale for temperature measuring. But its creator, Anders Celsius, was an oddball scientist. When he first developed his scale, he made freezing 100 degrees and boiling 0 degrees, or upside down. No one dared point this out to him, so fellow scientists waited until Celsius died to change the scale.

In Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact size and speeds of rotation. He did this more than 100 years before either moon was discovered.

At a jet plane's speed of 1,000 km (620mi) per hour, the length of the plane becomes one atom shorter than its original length.

In the Durango desert, in Mexico, there's a creepy spot called the "Zone of Silence." You can't pick up clear TV or radio signals. And locals say fireballs sometimes appear in the sky.

Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.

Bill Gates' first business was Traff-O-Data, a company that created machines which recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road.

Uranus' orbital axis is tilted at 90 degrees.

The final resting-place for Dr. Eugene Shoemaker - the Moon. The famed U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, trained the Apollo astronauts about craters, but never made it into space. Mr. Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut but was rejected because of a medical problem. His ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft before it was launched on January 6, 1998. NASA crashed the probe into a crater on the moon in an attempt to learn if there is water on the moon.

Outside the USA, Ireland is the largest software producing country in the world.

The first fossilized specimen of Australopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the paleontologists' favorite song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," by the Beatles.











Figlet, an ASCII font converter program, stands for Frank, Ian and Glenn's LETters.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

Plutonium - first weighed on August 20th, 1942, by University of Chicago scientists Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues - was the first man-made element.

The radioactive substance, Americanium - 241 is used in many smoke detectors.

The original IBM-PCs, that had hard drives, referred to the hard drives as Winchester drives. This is due to the fact that the original Winchester drive had a model number of 3030. This is, of course, a Winchester firearm.

Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air.

On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity.

Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agency's Olympus in 1993.

Starch is used as a binder in the production of paper. It is the use of a starch coating that controls ink penetration when printing. Cheaper papers do not use as much starch, and this is why your elbows get black when you are leaning over your morning paper.

Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper.

A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.

A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.

An ordinary TNT bomb involves atomic reaction, and could be called an atomic bomb. What we call an A-bomb involves nuclear reactions and should be called a nuclear bomb.

At a jet plane's speed of 1,000 km (620mi) per hour, the length of the plane becomes one atom shorter than its original length.

The first full moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, commonly called the first day of winter, happened in 1999. Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth), the moon appeared about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in it's elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth). Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at that time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon was about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this was the closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is constantly deforming. In places where the weather was clear and there was a snow cover, even car headlights were superfluous.

According to security equipment specialists, security systems that utilize motion detectors won't function properly if walls and floors are too hot. When an infrared beam is used in a motion detector, it will pick up a person's body temperature of 98.6 degrees compared to the cooler walls and floor. If the room is too hot, the motion detector won't register a change in the radiated heat of that person's body when it enters the room and breaks the infrared beam. Your home's safety might be compromised if you turn your air conditioning off or set the thermostat too high while on summer vacation.

Western Electric successfully brought sound to motion pictures and introduced systems of mobile communications which culminated in the cellular telephone.

On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., held a secret demonstration of the transistor which marked the foundation of modern electronics.

The wick of a trick candle has small amounts of magnesium in them. When you light the candle, you are also lighting the magnesium. When someone tries to blow out the flame, the magnesium inside the wick continues to burn and, in just a split second (or two or three), relights the wick.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Friendly Cat for Sale!

Are these two creatures really natural-born enemies? Perhaps there is indeed room for negotiation between enemies too…

Friendly Cat
I saw this brilliantly tragic image in an online forum the other day:















Awwwww! :(

I apologize that I don't know the source of the image or its creator, but it made me realize what an apt metaphor the missing puzzle piece can be. Even if you simplify the concept, it can be quite effective. So I made my own missing-puzzle-piece gallery:








































































That last one was too obvious wasn't it? Damn, why do I always have to go for the cheap and easy!? Shame on me!

Thursday, August 23, 2007

World's highest Escalator









































Pavement sex couple arrested

A Polish couple were pulled apart and arrested by police for having sex on a pavement alongside a busy road in broad daylight.

Pictures of the pair were caught on a shopping centre's CCTV cameras and have been reproduced in local newspapers.

Kamila Steranovska and Tomasz Mienkowicz, both 19, stripped off and started romping in front of astonished passers-by in the middle of the day in the Praga district of the capital Warsaw.

A police spokesman said: "They were so engrossed in their act that when we tried to arrest them they told us to get lost and leave them to finish what they were doing.

"They said they just couldn't help themselves."

Police released the pair without charge after no-one complained. Police may now have to answer a wrongful arrest charge from the couple.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Mailbox Picture Collection

I have always been impressed by the ability of a craftsman to take a boring mailbox and make it into a thing of interest, adventure or beauty-- Or simply mount it in a way to catch my eye-- We all see them every day but some are really neat-- below are a few but we would also like a picture of the neat mailboxes in your neighborhood---












Monday, August 20, 2007

38 Ways to simulate being in the Navy when you're at home

1.  Lock all friends and family outside.  Your only means of
communication should be with letters that your neighbours have held for
at least three weeks, discarding two of five.

2. Surround yourself with 200 people that you don't really know or
like: people who smoke, snore like Mack trucks going uphill,and use foul
language like a child uses sugar on cereal.

3. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the
outside world. Have a neighbour bring you a Time, Newsweek, or
Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.

4. Monitor all home appliances hourly, recording all vital information
(ie: plugged in, lights come on when doors open, etc)

5. Do not flush the toilet for five days to simulate the smell of 40
people using the same commode.

6. Lock the bathroom twice a day for a four hour period.

7. Wear only military uniforms. Even though nobody cares, clean and
press one dress uniform and wear it for 20 minutes.

8. Cut your hair weekly, making it shorter each time, until you look
bald or look like you lost a fight with a demented sheep.

9. Work in 19-hour cycles, sleeping only four hours at a time, to
ensure that your body does not know or even care if it is day or night.

10. Listen to your favourite CD 6 times a day for two weeks, then play
music that causes acute nausea until you are glad to get back to your
favourite CD.

11. Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed.
Add a roof that prevents you from sitting up (about 10 inches is a good
distance) then place it on a platform that is four feet off the floor.
Place a small dead animal under the bed to simulate the smell of your
bunkmate's socks.

12. Set your alarm to go off at 10 minute intervals for the first hour
of sleep to simulate the various times the watchstanders and nightcrew
bump around and wake you up. Place your bed on a rocking table to
ensure you are tossed around the remaining three hours. Make use of a
custom clock that randomly simulates fire alarms, police sirens,
helicopter crash alarms, and a new-wave rock band.

13. Have week old fruit and vegetables delivered to your garage and
wait two weeks before eating them.

14. Prepare all meals blindfolded using all the spices you can grope
for, or none at all. Remove the blindfold and eat everything in three
minutes.

15. Periodically, shut off all power at the main circuit breaker and
run around shouting "fire, fire, fire" and then restore power.

16. At least once a month, force the commode to overflow to simulate a
'black water system' boo-boo.

17. Buy a gas mask and smear it with rancid animal fat. Scrub the
faceshield with steel wool until you can no longer see out of it. Wear
this for two hours every fifth day especially when you are in the
bathroom.

18. Study the owner's manual for all household appliances. Routinely
take an appliance apart and put it back together.

19. Remove all plants, pictures and decorations. Paint everything
gray, white, or the shade of hospital smocks.

20. Buy 50 cases of toilet paper and lock up all but two rolls. Ensure
one of these two rolls is wet all the time.

21. Smash your forehead or shins with a hammer every two days to
simulate collision injuries sustained onboard Navy ships.

22. When making sandwiches, leave the bread out for six days, or until
it is hard and stale.

23. Every 10 weeks, simulate a visit to another port. Go directly to
the city slums wearing your best clothes. Find the worst looking place,
and ask for the most expensive beer that they carry. Drink as many as
you can in four hours. Take a cab home taking the longest possible
route. Tip the cabby after he charges you double because you dress
funny and don't speak right.

24. Use fresh milk for only two days after each port visit.

25. Keep the bedroom thermostat at 2 deg C and use only a thin blanket
for warmth.

26. Ensure that the water heater is connected to a device that provides
water at a flow rate that varies from a fast drip to a weak trickle,
with the temperature alternating rapidly from -2 to 95 deg C.

27. Use only spoons which hold a minimum of 1/2 cup at a time.

28. Repaint the interior of your home every month, whether it needs it
or not.

29. remind yourself every day: 'it's not just a job, _it's_an_adventure_!

30. mix kerosene with your water supply to simulate the de-sal plant on the
ship picking up jp5 in the intake -- if a lit match thrown into your
coffee pot doesn't ignite it, add more kerosene.


31. Stand outside at attention at dawn and have the poorest
reader you know read the morning paper outloud. Be sure to have
him skip over anything pertinent.

32. Every four hours, check the fluid level in your car's
radiator. Check the tire pressure and replace air lost from
excessive pressure checks. Be sure to place red tag on ignition
stating "DANGER: DO NOT OPERATE" while you perform these checks.
Inform your neighbor as to the results of these checks, have him
tell you to repeat the checks because he did not see you perform
them.

33. Paint your house grey (exterior) include windows except for
rooms you do not frequent, paint your car grey, paint your
driveway a different shade of grey.

34. Wait outside your dining area as a family member eats a
meal, then have that person serve you a meal prepared several
hours earlier.

35. Shut all blinds and doors at sunset.

36. Clean your house 'till there's absolutely not a speck of
dust anywhere. Call on a stranger to come inspect your house.
Ensure stranger sees dust that has collected in the time it took
to find him. Stranger cannot leave until he finds irrational
fault with your house/belongings.

37. Hang Christmas lights in June. When the neighbors ask, say,
"deceptive lighting."

38. Hang white lights when relatives visit. When neighbors ask,
say, "friendship lights."

Sunday, August 19, 2007

How to make origami kusudama flower

The Japanese word kusudama comes from two Japanese words kusuri (Medicine) and tama (Ball) They were often used with incense of potpourri. These days they are used more as decorative gifts.
Kusudama origami flowers are generally assembled into a large spherical shape. In today’s lesson we will be making a single flower. If you make another 11 of these, you can assemble them into a traditional kusudama ball. The flowers that make up the kusudama are beautiful in their own right. I was recently commissioned to fold over 200 of these flowers for the Honda stand at the Melbourne motor show. The flowers proved so popular that by the second day of the 14 day event a security guard was required to stop them all from disappearing even thought they were behind a persex shield. Thankfully they are fairly simple to make and I had help from a very good friend making replacements.
What you will need
• 5 Small squares of paper (I used Post-it notes because they come in such beautiful colors)
• PVA Glue
• About 30 minutes of spare time.

kusa 01

1. Start with the sticky edge on the bottom right side.
Fold the bottom corner to the top to make a triangle.
2. Fold both bottom corners of the triangle to the top point to form a square.

kusa 02

3. Fold the top two layers of the square backwards as shown. It is important that you ensure the folded back edges line up with the edges of the square beneath.
4. Open the newly formed triangles.
Be careful with the sticky side not to tear the paper.

kusa 03

5. Fold the top triangles over so they are level with the edge of the paper.
These flaps should be seperated from the others layers.
6. Fold the triangles along the existing crease.
kusa 04
7. Add a small amount of glue to one side and attach to the other triangle.
8. Your glued petal should look like this.
9. Now follow steps 1-7 to fold four more.
kusa 05

10. Gluing the petals together is quite simple.
Make sure you let the glue dry before adding the next petal.
11. Completed flower.

Tips and Tricks in Love

Falling in love is the easy part.
It's staying that way that takes some work.
So instead of saying...


"This relationship stuff. It gives me
a headache just to think about it."

Try to change your attitude a bit.


"Okay, I'm taking notes!"

Tip #1
Make a list.
When you find yourself feeling critical
of your beloved, sit down and make a list of
"All The Things I Still Love About My Mate."
This will remind you of why you first fell in love.


"Hmmm... Something I love about him?"

Pretty soon, you'll find yourself thinking...


"Say, he's not so bad after all!"

And making that list goes for both of you
—to help you both remember the good.


"That's what we do.
And it really works to
remind us of our love."

Tip #2
Start spreading the news.
At least once a day, compliment each other.
Because everyone loves to hear good news.


"Thank you, Mary, for taking such good care of me."


"And thank you for scrubbing out the roasting pan!"

Tip #3
Learn what to say.
(And how to listen.)
When it comes to communication,
men and women have different needs.
Men need to hear they've done a good job.


"Honey, I fixed that leak under the sink!"

So remember to compliment him for things he does.
(Even if he doesn't do them that well.)


"Who knew plumbing could be so rewarding?
I'll have to help out more around the house!"

Women need to feel their man is listening.
Men can help by learning the "Mantra for Men"
and practicing it often, saying to themselves,
again and again...


Just listen, don't give advice.
Just listen, don't give advice.
Just listen, don't give advice.

The results can be amazing.


"Wow, he really listened to me!"

Tip #4
Learn to soothe frayed nerves
When your partner is having trouble coping
—either with the world or with you—
don't shout, don't pout, don't run away.
Just turn to your mate and lovingly say...


"Honey, what do you need from me...
right now?"

So instead of wondering what to say or do...


Should I say X? Do Y? Not do Z?
What does that woman want from me?

Just remember those nine magic words:
"Honey, what do you need from me... right now?"
No more wondering, no more guess work.


"Who knew life could be so easy!?"




Tip #5
Give a little more.
Instead of trying to get your way,
try to give a little,
then give a little more.
So instead of...


"Listen up, lover boy!"
or


"This is the way it's going to be."

Learn to think more "We" than "Me."
You'll have a lot less...


"Gosh honey. I don't know what I was thinking."

And a lot more...


"I know what you're thinking!"