alligator

Oddly enough, fish and wildlife officers in the dry, desert state of Arizona confiscate a fair number of alligators each year. Unfortunate alligator Mr. Stubbs was one of those captured critters when he was brought to the Phoenix Herpetological Society back in 2005. He arrived minus a very important body part: his tail.

Tailless Mr. Stubbs had to learn how to swim by paddling with his front feet, something that probably caused all the other alligators to snicker at him behind his back. More recently, the society and CORE Institute, a center specializing in orthopedic care for people, banded together to craft a new prosthetic tail for the gator.… Read more

Where's My Water? is a charming physics puzzler, in which you funnel clean water to the bathtub of a fastidious little alligator named Swampy.

Where's My Water? ranks among the better arcade puzzlers, sharing some similarities (fast-paced levels, an intuitive interface, and a winningly cartoony protagonist) but with a central schtick that's mostly all its own: you dig paths through dirt, creating channels for liquid to flow from one place to another. Ideally, you'll get enough clean water into a pipe to fill Swampy's tub, but along the way you have to contend with various … Read more

Where's My Water? is a charming physics puzzler, in which you funnel clean water to the bathtub of a fastidious little alligator named Swampy.

Where's My Water? ranks among the better arcade puzzlers, sharing some similarities (fast-paced levels, an intuitive interface, and a winningly cartoony protagonist) but with a central schtick that's mostly all its own: you dig paths through dirt, creating channels for liquid to flow from one place to another. Ideally, you'll get enough clean water into a pipe to fill Swampy's tub, but along the way you have to contend with various … Read more

The alligator, an animal that's been around since the time of the dinosaurs, can help reduce our use of fossil fuels, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Louisiana yesterday published a paper that concluded alligator fat has good potential for biodiesel. Fifteen million pounds of alligator fat is disposed of in landfills annually from U.S. industry, which slaughters alligators for their skin and meat.

The focus of the research was to understand the characteristics of alligator oil and to see whether it could be easily converted into biodiesel. The researchers found that alligator oil … Read more

It is not April Fool's Day. But perhaps there are folks at Amazon.com for whom, given that they work so hard, every day is April 1.

Or perhaps not.

The story that I wish to relate, as told by Will Collier, one of the world's more original bloggers, is that he ordered a computer part via Amazon. It did not arrive.

Now Amazon tends to be one of the finer online retailers when it comes to customer service, so Collier thought that one quick call to a customer service rep would surely locate his errant part.

Might … Read more

So, in Florida they're taping magnets to crocodiles heads to keep them from moving back to suburbia. It's also last call for Vista, with SP2 released to developers. And we talk about good sex and how it shouldn't be filtered in Australia. Oh, and flying cars. Of course.

Nintendo needs help with piracy http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/26/1118217 http://kotaku.com/5160062/what-countries-made-nintendos-rampant-piracy-list-this-year

Australian Internet censorship plan torpedoed http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/26/1344207

U.S. antitrust judge … Read more

When I was a kid, my family put a life-size plastic owl near our house to keep birds and squirrels away from the porch. (At least, I think that's why they had a life-size plastic owl near our house.) Unfortunately, I don't think it worked all that well, because last I heard, the cat had mauled it and thrown it into the hedge. I suppose it really wasn't that scary.

Consequently, the next time I'm desperate to scare away animals, small children, or the IRS, I'm going to get one of these instead. Because this … Read more