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.

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.

DIY street anonymizer

EDIT: Ahh, this was a video post, but the video no longer works. It was either too edgy to remain public or all the additional traffic from this blog crashed their servers. I don't know which, but I'll try to explain what it showed so this isn't an utterly wasted post.

Tiny Infra-red LEDs can be used to hide your face from security cameras. These LEDs are small lights that require only tiny batteries to power and can be easily mounted anywhere.

CCTV cameras don't like Infra-red light when they're stalking you after sunset. In low light they enhance the image, and the Infra-red LED shows too bright for the picture. Mount one on your head, and you become unrecognisable on camera, protected by a halo of anoyminity.

The now deleted video below showed you how to fit the LED into some cheap sun-glasses and what this does to your image on CCTV cameras.
What a brilliant idea. Tastes like the cyberpunk anarcho-future to me.

Magic mirror shades that render you invisible to the MAN.


Unlikely to be the first or best method developed for tricking CCTV, but brilliant in its simplicity. The thick black frames and DIY aestetic will even appeal to the fashion sense of your local graffiti artists and urban explorers.

What does this mean? Will every Hoodie in the UK who never skipped electronics lessons dash out to buy themselves the reasonably priced kit and wire up their baseball cap before their next mugging or shady deal?

Unlikely: The feral youth don't read gadget blogs, and they couldn't give a damn about CCTV in the first place.

The first time my car got broken into the little buggers were careful to batter the nearby CCTV camera too. The next time me motor got the hoodies' handshake the police told me that all the local CCTV cameras were fake or not recording.

I'm sure it's true that CCTV does help clear up some cases of casual violence and crime. I just doubt it really protects society against any kind of premeditated misbehavior; it's already too easy to avoid with a simple hat or hood.

Writing about CCTV in todays Guardian, Marine Hyde suggests, "(You) could always don a hood. Yet there does seem a vaguely depressing irony in governments insisting that constant surveillance is essential to prevent our being overrun by repressive regimes who'd make us all cover our heads and the like."

We can only hope criminals do try this hi-tech soloution instead of their hoods, because while these lights might hide you from night-time CCTV, they mark you with a beacon to any loitering Police helicopter or UAV.

At any rate, just look what else you can do with IR LED glasses.

Four For Finking

If old news is new to some its news. Yeh?
Sharing some things I read about today.
Submarines, Japan, sdrawkcab and car-jacking...


Growing numbers of drug runners are using DIY submarines [Wired]
Worth reading just for the term 'narco-terrorists'. Consider.
If the A Team smugled drugs, this is how they'd do it.

Japanease advertisers give out search words instead of tricky URLs [via BoingBoing]
An old story but I looked it up again. If most people find content through Google, why have a memorable address - just make sure you're easy to search for and keep people on site when they arrive. Screw the front door, front page, tiny URL. Lets get straight to the good stuff.

Chigaco newspaper prints backwards frontpage as protest against gun crime [via Greenslade]
Expect to see the Independant trying this pretty soon.

BBC reminds us that GTA is made in Scotland [BBC]
This game is going to be huge. Not simply from a sales perspective - we've all seen the queues to buy Halo or Mario on TV before - but because it marks the first time the whole mainstream media is really taking a game seriously as a cultural landmark rather than a novelty for kids. Recognition is an important step.
And it's made in Edinburgh - the UK should be prouder of this than we are.
The only thing the new GTA is lacking is tiny home-made submarines for drug smuggling.