How do you build a mouse Utopia? In 1972,
John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. . . . To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.
posted by saladin
on Aug 18, 2011 -
27 comments
Asciiflow will let you draw ASCII art with a mouse and skip a lot of painstaking space-bar-hitting.
posted by ignignokt
on Aug 5, 2011 -
51 comments
The Wet-Dog Shake (SLYT). Scientists have worked out the optimum amount of shaking that animals have to do to dry themselves after getting wet. Filming in slow motion, they captured various animals shaking themselves off, from a wet mouse to a big grizzly bear.
[more inside]
posted by 7-7
on Oct 30, 2010 -
41 comments
Less than two weeks after a controversial paper came to light advocating the pre-natal treatment of some female fetuses with a hormone to make their behavior more stereotypically female (
previously discussed here) comes news of actual animal research on causing the opposite inclination. By knocking out the fucose mutarotase gene, scientists in South Korea have apparently created "Lesbian mice" who prefer other female mice and who resist the attempts of male mice to mate with them.
Article abstract, and
coverage by The Telegraph.
posted by Asparagirl
on Jul 9, 2010 -
19 comments
Full Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse album Dark Night of the Soul is streaming right now on
NPR. Info about album dispute
here.
posted by forallmankind
on May 16, 2009 -
50 comments
On Sunday, April 1, ThinkGeek.com jokingly introduced the 8-bit Tie, and due to customer demand, claims that now it'll be
a real product.
On Friday, April 13, apparently due to customer demand, hard drive manufacturer WiebeTech has now introduced the
MouseJiggler, and claims it's not a joke.
posted by Fofer
on Apr 14, 2007 -
28 comments
Hacking the Senses: The brain is far more plastic than we commonly realize. Presenting new 'senses' via the old inputs works extremely well, to the point that long-term volunteers are a little lost without their new abilities to feel magnetic north or absolute orientation. Tasting direction; feeling pictures. Fascinating stuff. In a loosely related article,
genetically modified mice are able to see the full color range visible to humans, even though the last natural mouse able to see this way died out a hundred million years ago. Add the new sensors, and the brain reconfigures.
[via]
posted by Malor
on Apr 5, 2007 -
68 comments
I'm embarassed for my mice to have to say this but ... Their testicles are HUGE, like almost as big as their heads. Good thing for humanity too, as mice testicles may provide a source of
stem cells free of the usual ethical
considerations.They may also hold the solutions to
transplant rejection and
infertility. Is there anything those fuzzy globes can't do?
posted by hindmost
on Mar 28, 2006 -
22 comments
MouseCount counts the number of times you click your mouse--information useful to computer usage studies, ergonomics, repetitive stress measurement, and more. This program saves you the trouble of counting all those clicks yourself! Screw that, I'm just a curious dork. (fyi: link goes to description page only, but the download is a .zip file)
posted by Ufez Jones
on Feb 25, 2004 -
6 comments
Imagine my glee in finding
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable online and searchable.
Then, imagine my glee in finding out that
Tom and Jerry have a non-animated
past.
AND they're a
drink.
AND they're a
play!
They (the originals, that is) used to be wildly popular. Now they're all but forgotten, except in cat / mouse form. What wildly popular
"works" will our great grandchildren forget completely? (I had to wash my cache out with soap after that last one)
posted by condour75
on Oct 17, 2002 -
11 comments
High Art. Rick Griffin's famous flying eyeball poster is considered by many to be the single finest example of San Francisco psychedelic poster art. The image comes from this fabulous motherlode of eye candy that is Paul Olsen's
Fillmore and Avalon poster collection. It is the largest and most complete collection of its sort. He would like to sell it as a whole--The Whitney Museum wants to buy it but can't afford it. That should tell you something.
Come step behind the Indian bedspread curtain and smell the incense.
posted by y2karl
on Oct 10, 2002 -
20 comments
Modern computing born... film at 11. "On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface."
posted by pascal
on Jul 11, 2001 -
5 comments
"You are about to activate
your first gesture command in Opera. A gesture command is activated by pressing the right mouse button, and while holding it down, performing a simple movement with the mouse, and then releasing the button"... such as left going back a page, or down opening a new window. Aliens bless gesture interfaces, and Molyneux.
posted by holloway
on Apr 11, 2001 -
17 comments
Ebola is for wimps! Some Australian scientists were trying to come up with a mouse contraceptive vaccine, for use in pest control. And they succeeded. Unfortunately, the virus they created works by killing mice before they can breed, and killing them very very well. Oh, and it's extremely vaccine-resistant: 100% death without vaccine, 50% with. And any kid with a Li'l Johnny Gene Engineering Kit could conceivably make a human version. Anyone got some smallpox virus laying around?
posted by aaron
on Jan 10, 2001 -
5 comments
iFeel your pane Logitech comes out with a mouse that has a sense of touch. Called the iFeel mouse, it has the potential to do some interesting things with games, but does anyone see the use it could potentially have in UI usage? Would it be easier to navigate GUIs if you got a subtle bump when you hit certain clickable spots?
posted by daveadams
on Aug 22, 2000 -
18 comments
