How a bored Octopus basically won at the Internet, and a little bit of Cuttlefish sign language

Sometimes if I like a story I see in the newspaper, I throw it up on Reddit, to share it with other witty, intelligent beings. This afternoon I enjoyed a story about an Octopus called Otto, so I shared it in a few places with a new headline:

Bored Octopus shoots out lights, then trashes aquarium and juggles crabs

As I approach my 2,000th vote of confidence, I'd like to thank the Internet for electing me Halloween winner. Otto, I couldn't have done it without you.

Some reactions from the fans:
tmiltznc "This is the best damn title ever on reddit for me :-)"
mizaya "This is my favorite Reddit submission ever."
HeywoodFloyd "The story itself cannot possibly be as awesome at the title so I won't even other reading it."
Maxxover "One of the best stories here, ever."
tempyra "The coolest thing I've read involving an animal all week (cat photos don't count)."
cruise02 "That might be the best headline I've ever seen on reddit."

But also some fascinating things about Octopi - because we all love animal facts.
They are actually shockingly clever animals, but sadly their learning is limited by their very short life spans. People have been popping up on the comments with all kinds of anecdotes and warnings about the intelligent octopus threat. I've copied a few of the best across here.

Saydrah - "I was 13 and on a school trip to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. Each kid in the class had been assigned a sea critter to study, and mine was the Cuttlefish [closely related to Octopi - Ben]. I realized while writing my report that in almost every photo of a cuttlefish where it was clear that it could see the person taking the photo, it held its tentacles like this: http://www.thepasty.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/Cuttlefish.jpg
I was also learning some sign language at the time, and it clicked: It's a greeting. At least, that was my theory, and as soon as I got to the aquarium I sought out the cuttlefish to test it.

There were 16 cuttlefish in the tank. I asked a staff member about them, and she said, "I know we put 16 in there, but they blend in so well we haven't seen more than 6 at a time since then. There haven't been any bodies, so I presume there are still 16."

At first I could spot two, camouflaged on rocks. I went up to the tank, knelt down, and held my fingers in the greeting pose from the photos. Incidentally, cuttlefish have 10 tentacles, two of which are set back and only shoot out to grab prey. Much like 10 fingers with two set back thumbs. It's easy to make your hands into a recognizably cuttlefish like shape.

With 10 minutes, I had 13 cuttlefish lined up at the front of the tank doing the greeting pose back at me. My teacher got all this on video, and a couple staff members came over and were floored at the sight. They started doing the sign language at the cuttlefish too, and the cuttlefish responded to them also. Some of them also changed color, which obviously I couldn't mimic, and made different tentacle poses, which I tried to repeat back to them.
After a couple minutes, one smallish cuttlefish turned red, grabbed a shrimp that was in the tank as a snack for the cuttles, and pushed the shrimp up against the glass in front of my hands. It seemed to be offering it to me. Then a larger cuttlefish turned white, grabbed the shrimp from the smaller one, and the big cuttlefish then repeated the effort to push it through the glass to me! The small cuttlefish turned gravel patterned, shot a jet of water out, and went to hide behind a tank decoration.

That was the high point-- I kept talking with them for about an hour, and I did manage to identify what I think were a few other specific signs. I do think the one I originally used was in fact a greeting, since they returned the same sign to me and to each other. There was also a pose that I think is a threat, because they did it to each other and then one (the submissive/weaker one?) would move away and sometimes change color. If I did that pose, they would either return it to me and have a standoff of sorts, or would move away from the glass. There also seemed to be a friendship/relaxation type of sign, because after a while of holding the greeting pose, a few of them shifted into another pose but didn't change color or move away."

So they can use tools, control their environment, and we can communicate with them. Nice - That's really A-List stuff for animals.

AlejandroTheGreat "Someone needs to lobby for a law forbidding researchers from letting an octopus occupy the same room as a crow, if the crows taught the octopuses how to use tools we're doomed."

ibisum "I love octopus. They are just the coolest creatures. Once, when I was snorkelling in my homeland (down under) I happened to notice this sort of 'lazy bit of weed' sprouting, unusually, out of a hole .. with the hollowed out head of a cray fish attached to it. As my eye is usually tuned to such things (never once paid for fishing tackle in my life, courtesy of all the stuff I've collected off the reefs), I decided to get a closer look and, of course, it turned out to be an octopus - FISHING!
You see, he was just sitting in his hole, lazily dangling an arm out of it, using the crayfish to attract small whiting and other fish stupids to his lair .. as soon as they'd come in for a quick feed - BANG! - out he'd shoot, grab 'em, and into his hole he'd go. I watched him fishing like that for about an hour, and it was truly awesome.. the way that little arm swung around in the current, just lolling about with his craftily deployed crayfish head. Brilliant little buggers."

trevdak2 "Octopi are really quite brilliant creatures. They have a grasp of tool use that almost rivals chimps and are very creative, adventurous, and learn quickly.
I have a friend whose mom is a marine biologist. She goes out on crabbing boats, and has a great story of octopi boarding the boat, opening the freezer, and stealing caught crabs for themselves."

crusoe "I for one welcome our new octopus overlords!"

Final thought for the day:
tehxaton "Otto would have been a better pick for VP than Palin."

Top animal conflicts: Predator and prey

The internet loves lists, it loves animals, it love pictures and it loves fights. This post has it all. May I present - a list of unusual animal conflicts that I've come across in the last few weeks.

Giant Spider eats a bird
Popular this week: A giant Golden Orb Weaver spider in Australia traps and eats a passing Finch. The web is strong enough to hold the 10cm bird while it is drained of blood by Shelob's young cousin.

Great White Shark acrobatic eating
Jaws here is mainly a tube of muscle with a whole bunch of teeth at one end. Nothing unusual about a Shark eating a seal, but rather impressive pictures. The shark seems to be' showing off; dinner with a backflip.

Pelican feasts on puzzeled Pigeon
There have been Pelicans in London's St James' Park for more than 300 years. Exactly when they decided Pigeons were tasty is unknown, but anything that clears the flying rats from town is welcome.
More pictures Here.

Mouse bites venomous viper to death
The plucky mouse dives and rolls, avoiding the clumsy strikes of the ancient serpent, before spotting an opening and striking true. I name this mouse Bard.

Leopard savages crocodile
Two true predators, an even contest. Sure, the Croc looks rather small, but lets not take anything away from the cat who decided to make a meal of the longest surviving species on the planet.

Horse and Hound: The Revenge
Now we don't know what happened after this photo, but I have to assume horse trampled hound to death and ate the dog's guts and eyes, before wearing it's skin as a grisly hat.

Heron gulps down Rabbit
This one shocked me the most. This is a cute bunny we're talking about here, but the heron knows no mercy. Clever bird, because I'm pretty sure drowning won't work on it's usual prey, fish. It must have done this before...

Alien Vs Predator
Who cares.

I'm not an economist, but...

'iPod generation' most at risk from credit crunch as one in five has £10k debts

I'm not an economist and I don't know what I'm talking about.
But let me list the things that seem wrong about the study in this article:

"Dubbed the "iPod generation" as they are Insecure, Pressurised, Over-taxed and Debt-Ridden" - I'd hate to think they just tacked 'Insecure' on the front there to make it spell iPod. Where did it come from though? It has no basis in the article. Don't you love it when analyists try to get trendy, making nonsense of their points.


"Over half of those surveyed said they had debts of up to £10,000" - That'd be the student loans then, not just throwing money at shiney things. I believe we protested those at the time.

"Yet few know about the value of pensions and investments, which puts them at great risk as the economic boom of the past decade ends" - Um, pensions and investments? Arn't they the things that just crashed? Pretty glad I didn't waste my cash on them. Investing my money in tinned food and second hand gold.

"In addition, the study of 1,000 people found half of young adults rely on friends and family for advice on money rather than independent financial advisers." - This is a study by Independant financial advisors. And what excellent advice they've been giving out in the last decade.

"With the global credit crunch ransacking financial markets, this generation will struggle to pay off debts and find lenders prepared to finance house purchases" - Or... wait till houses become affordable again. It's not my generation that fucked up the world by calling home 'property'.

""A continuation of current trends would see ever-increasing distrust of government and financial institutions coupled with a lack of capability to do anything about it."

The return to Oz

The start of a new weekend feature on Terminal Moraine - link blogging all the best things I've read online in the last week.

The Things He Carried - The Atlantic
I havn't had the pleasure of heading to the US in recent years, but with Russian and Iranian visas at the front of my passport and a Hamas TV-Shirt, it could be fun no matter how blue my eyes. US border authorities the TSA have an awful reputation for paranoid bullying, which achieves precisely nothing in terms of security. The Atlantic exposes just how useless they are.
Not that it's just a US problem - My lovely lady recently got in trouble for trying to take saline solution to France. The War on Moisture at British airports continues.

How We Lost the War We Won - Rolling Stone
On the ground with the Taliban. Nir Rosen is the only western journalist for some time to get frontline access to militia groups fighting in Afghanistan. It's important we all know who we're fighting out there.

The night I was 'killed in action' - Telegraph
Telegraph man in Afghanistan embedded with US National Guardsmen gets hit by IED.

Unleash the Puppies of War! - Danger Room
More from Afghanistan - The dogs adopted by US soldiers and their struggle to take them home to the US at the end of their service. There are now groups set up to help get the dogs vaccinated and flown back.

A Crisis of Conscience - Change.org
The bank bail outs cost a lot of money. In the US alone it's cost $850billion. Sure the idea is that the taxpayer will get a lot of it back at interest, and we need the banks to opperate to keep the economy running, but the sheer size of the investment is staggering. Like the 3 trillion dollar cost of the war in Iraq, you have to wonder how else it could have been spent. Change.org look at what kind of difference $850bn would make to the third world. Hint: Free healthcare for everyone on the planet for a decade.

Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams - The Telegraph
"I only dream in black and white" sang Iron Maiden. Probably because they're old you see. I wonder what the next stage is, because my dreams frequently feature a crosshair and health bar. Too many games?

Moving pictures

Zero Punctuation: Stalker review - The Escapist
Talking of games - Breathless snarky video reviews that manage to be funny, opinioned and also damn good criticism.

The Daily Show - Comedy Central
Comedy writing inspired to match the scale of current events. I've been watching the show daily and it does a brilliant job of addressing all the big issues with smart understanding, warmth and wit. Stewart can get a little too Dr Evil, and the correspondants arn't as funny, but the shows a powerhouse of intelligent commentary.

Man bites Dog

Wise man once say: "If a dog bites a man it is sad for man, but not a story. But if a man he bites a dog, then this is news!"


Spotted in Friday's Telegraph.

Charlie Brooker fails at Search Engine Optimisation at the Guardian

This week at the Guardian former PC Zone Editor and TV critic turned usually funny ranter Charlie Brooker penned a little rant against agressive online news marketing.

To my mind he's a little off the mark. Brooker suggests that news websites are dropping popular online search terms into stories just to build hits and advertising revenue.

Sure he's being deliberatly absurd when he drops BRITNEY and POKER into his headlines, but he never calms down enough to make a rational point or provide a single real example.

He suggests that popular but irrelevant terms are inserted into stories to make the stories rank higher on search engines. Personally I've never seen any example of this at the Telegraph. It's nonsense. Putting random words like Britney into an unrelated headline would distract the search engines and bury your story behind a mass of existing Britney content. And if readers did end up there they'd be quickly disapointed, which is fatal for free media which relies on it's reputation. So if you tried Brookers tricks you'd quickly find both search engines and users ignoring you.

The practice he's really aiming at but doesn't seem to understand it the dark art of Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is about making your story easy for interested readers to find; it's about being clear and explicit about your content so it can be easily located.

Online headlines on website news stories are read by machines, not people. The headline people read is the link that takes them there. It's the search engines which give priority to the page headlines and so yes, they are dull and descriptive. And descriptive means using the words a reader might associate with the story. If it's about Obama then you write "Barack Obama", you add "US Elections" to clarify the context and you outline the issue in the obvious language. This has always been the way because web users like to identify content rapidly and all good sites help them do this. Confusing newspaper headlines with puns that take a moment to register are no use online.

As for Brooker's suggestion that writers control the positioning of words on the page in an F shape; this is the sign of a chap who doesn't venture into the newsroom much. Writers rarely have any control over the published layout of their copy and thus little control over what words appear on what line. It'd be nice if they could, and I'm sure the F shape theory is true, but in practice it doesn't happen.

What is true is that writing should be diferent online from newspapers. I believe Amazon once calculated that users spend only 4 seconds on any given web page. The writer then has 4 seconds, or just a couple of lines, to impart the most vital information to satisfy the reader. Many users don't even read in chunks online. Studies that track eye movements show most users are able to rapidly scan for details and answers to their questions without reading whole paragraphs.

Writing should be tailored differently for the web to take into acount new forms of reading. There are dangers to the accurate and impartial ideals of journalism and I have a number of reservations about online news practice, but Brooker doesn't really pick up on them.

The two types of quote mark

Did you know there are two types of quote mark on computers?

I didn't until a few months ago when I arrived at the Telegraph and was sent on a search and destroy mission for the wrong sort.

It's so irritating I wanted to share.

It seems there are both curley and straight quote marks in the world, even within each font.
We have the curled: “ ”
And the straight: " "

When you type you'll probably only use the straight ones. But if you copy and paste something from a document, you could find yourself copying the curley ones. Even if they look exactly the same in whatever you're typing - they won't when you publish.

Mixing them up is just madness.

So don't you let anyone try to tell you you don't need specalist elite training to be a Web Journalist.

The Telegraph storms ahead

For anyone who hadn't noticed, the Telegraph.co.uk has just overtaken the Guardian as the UK's most popular national newspaper website.

It's a close run thing at the top of the charts, with the Daily Mail online also making big gains. All three sites now sit around the 18 million monthly users mark. Most impressivly that means the Telegraph has added around 7 million readers in the last year. The Guardian has in fact dropped by about 1% whilst the Mail is seeing healthy growth.

Telegraph Communities editor Shane Richmond is predicting the lead will swap around a little in the near future, but it's clear the Telegraph's made a big jump.

It doesn't seem like the Guardian has taken this very well. Back in April Guardian Media writer Jemima Kiss wrote about how the Telegraph.co.uk was growing fast by boosting page download speeds, producing more content and improving it's search rankings.

Now they've been overtaken they're complaining, and together with the Mail and the Times have called for a review of the way website traffic is calculated.

I don't know what will come of it, but the timing smacks of sour grapes. It's no crime to improve your product and market it better. And this is a growing market, not a limited number of users to be won away from rivals.

Methods of measuring website traffic are vague at best and nobody can quite agree what exactly should be counted. Is it better for twenty people to read one story, or one loyal reader to read twenty?

Perhaps it's really up to the advertisers to judge sucess as that's where the money comes from, not the readers. But then are their adverts simple brand awareness exercises, or do they expect readers to click through and buy products. How do they measure sucess?

Maybe it's just the news demand that's shifted market share. As the credit crunch hits, readers are drawn away from the Gurdian's liberal worldwide focus and pay more attention to the Telegraph's sharp domestic business news.

Politically too the wind has shifted away from the Guardian as Labour slump and Conservative media is boosted.

Now the other interesting piece of news this week was the BBC website's massive overspend. All the news traffic they pull in hurts the newspaper websites, and if they face cuts it could boost the newspaper sites again.

So in the bleak newspaper market, at least the websites are looking the picture of good health.

Imperfect and tense

Below the fold is a round-up of everything I wrote on placement at the Telegraph in the last two weeks.
I was only writing one or two pieces a day for the site, and some of my stuff was later replaced by other journalists (we usually throw the basics up online while we wait for the experts to pitch in), but I think it's a decent slab of work.
Some of them are quite funny.

I'm back now anyway, so normal service will resume shortly, including:
Blunkett - "two thirds of the shadow cabinet were..."
Cameron - The hush
Photoshop - Leave me never
Byron - Suprisingly dull
Liger Vs Pizzly
Cage-fighting toddlers on YouTube/Bebo

Telegraph Online

American caught having sex with picnic table
The X-Files to return to cinemas
BBC Olympic staff to outnumber athletes
Titanic survivor's secrets revealed
Brown got lost 'at the crucial moment'
Rogue monkey accused of attempted rapes
Robin Williams to divorce second wife
Terminal 5 opens as British Airways move in
Heather Mills to challenge Sir Paul's valuation
Bingo winner shares jackpot with neighbour
Arab student denies killing Norwegian woman
Engineering overrun causes rail travel delays
Missing boy Ben Smythe found 'safe and well'
Kurt Cobain smoked oregano with his mum
Push-up bra is 'greatest fashion invention ever'
Women-only hotel opens in Saudi Arabia
Simon Cowell is cancer girl's 'guardian angel'
Tunnelling badgers disturb family graves