now that's thinking with your dipstick!

according to the april 19, 2009 issue of news of the weird:

Biologist Michelle Solensky, of Ohio's College of Wooster, reported late last year in the journal Animal Behavior that male monarch butterflies are such calculating inseminators that they even decide the optimal level of sperm necessary for reproductive advantage. While injecting fluid, the male can "selectively" determine how much of it will be fertility cells, depending on how much residual sperm the female holds from previous suitors (and thus to always inject more than the other guys did). Solensky told New Scientist magazine that the penis acts as a kind of "dip stick" to check the quantity already present. [New Scientist, 1-7-09]

reading this leaves me with one question, and one question only: are you thinking what i'm thinking?

facebook weirdness

a rather odd thing happened on facebook today.

no, it wasn't the fact that one of my friends' accounts was captured by a phisher, and sent out messages to everyone on her friends list that they should check out some facebook clone site. sadly, that's all too common. the weird thing is what happened when i tried to tell her what was going on.

i couldn't tell her exactly what the phishing messages said via facebook. i wrote out an email explaining what was going on in detail--the email that i got, what it said, and the results when i researched the website that was being propagated, and found it to be a facebook phishing website. i sent the message to her, and it told me that there was "content that some facebook users found objectionable" in my email, and that i could not send it.

that was weird. am i surprised that facebook can see what i'm sending in my emails? no. but, is it a bit annoying? sure. let's just say that i'm glad that i don't use facebook for any kind of sensitive communication--but, then again, sensitive communication isn't what social networking sites are for.

anyway, i assumed that it was because there was the phish email earlier in the thread, and that it would work fine when i started a new thread. so, i surfed over to her profile and sent the message there. it gave me an "unknown error." finally, frustrated, i edited out any vestiges of the content (read: any specific information that may actually help her point to which particular phishing scammer that ensnared her!), and that went through.

in one sense, i'm a little impressed that within a few minutes of that email, facebook had stopped allowing emails to propagate that phishing site. however, i'm wondering how long they keep the site in their filters, since there were websites definitely older than just this morning that discussed the fact that the site name being propagated (kirgo.at, for the curious) is a phishing scam and not a legitimate website to check.

on the other hand, it's kind of annoying that i can't notify her on facebook of exactly what's going on. i guess that it's not that bad, since i could always use email or IM instead of facebook to notify her. in retrospect, that's what i should have done...sent the full message via email. i'm an idiot when i haven't been out of bed for very long.

you're a rorschach test on fire...

proof that i'm not the only one who thought mathnet was the bee's knees:



i <3 you, xkcd.

(however...-1, my dear randall munroe, for misspelling mandelbrot in the alt-text of the comic.)