Category: Science & Technology

The Drudge Report had a link to this story a day or two ago.  It turns out that:

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of…warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents…

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist (Ilya Ivanov): "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat…"

Mr Ivanov’s experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail…

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years’ jail, which was later commuted to five years’ exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.

Stalin’s half-man, half-ape super warriors

This could all be a hoax, but then again, there were more than a few who had strange ideas about genetics in the early to mid 20th century.  Certainly, Lysenko’s genetic theories had more devastating effects on the Soviet Union (and later China) than Ivanov’s futile attempts to cross species.  Still, the story brought this exchange to mind:

Mrs. Krabappel:  Are there any questions?

Bart Simpson:  How would I go about creating a half-man, half-monkey type creature?

Mrs. Krabappel: I’m sorry, that would be playing God.

Bart Simpson:  God, shmod, I want my monkey-man!

UPDATE:  Looks like Instapundit beat me to the Bart Simpson reference by two days.  D’oh!

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– that they want to use it to fuel their cars.

Mmmmmm.  Fill ‘er up with a tankful of Bordeaux Red, Jacques.

Good to see they’re exploring alternative uses for their plonk.  You don’t think that the Paris-tinians will actually let them DRINK that stuff after they implement Sharia Law, do you?

Grape biofuel may end French vintner crisis

Does anyone remember the singing mice from the movie "Babe"?

Turns out the concept wasn’t entirely fictional after all.  The Nov 2nd edition of the Taipei Times reprinted a story from The Guardian about the ultrasonic songs that mice make.  Click on the link below for more:

Singing Mice Article

Audio Clip #1 (Pitch reduced by 4 octaves)

Audio Clip #2 (Speed and pitch reduced 16X further)

Their songs are very similar to that of birds warbling away.  Quite pretty, actually.

The Taiwan News had an interesting story about the intelligence of dogs.  In some ways, dogs seem to be smarter than wolves or even chimps(!), because dogs pay attention to the things that people do.  That is to say, they’ve been bred to socialize with people, so they watch for social cues that can help them solve problems.

Dogs’ smarts linked to their relationship with people

I was at the Warner Village cinemas in Taipei earlier this week to see the new "Wallace and Grommit" movie.  It was pretty good, although I don’t think it’s necessary to put sexual innuendo into a family movie to get adults into the theaters.

In the lobby was a 3D widescreen television.  This was a kind that I’d never seen before, which didn’t require the wearing of any special glasses.

It was mostly just playing TV commercials – French commercials.  Razors floated in front of the screen while rotating.  Pop bottles doing the same, then pouring out their contents.  The best was one for a detergent or fabric softener, where a feather gently swayed from side-to-side as it fell through the air.

Most of them were very well done, like the concession stand ad with popcorn bursting out of the screen, threatening to hit the viewer.  One or two weren’t very good, and just gave me a headache.  For some reason, seeing all of this reminded me of some of Schwartzenegger’s sci-fi action flicks.  The future looks very cool, indeed.