Breakfast Links: Luxury Submarines, Open Library & Giant Lion-eating Chimps
So you know that I plan on having many modes of transport when I’m rich. I have just learned of a new one - luxury submarines! I mean it’s so perfect, first of all it’s a submarine, right? Awesome? Yeah, and when the world is a nuclear wasteland, you’ll be able to easily avoid the mutants (except the ones that grow gills, but that shouldn’t be too many). But you gotta check these quotes from the guy who makes them:
I’m a poet who builds submersible yachts for rich people.
And his dad thought his poetry major wouldn’t get to make him any money!
“Navies want weapon-delivery systems,” Jones says, “I build luxury-delivery systems for people who have more money than they know what to do with.”
Luxury delivery systems! But what’s the downside?
Jaubert says one of the dangers shared by members of this underwater fraternity of the super-rich is being blown to smithereens by depth charges.
Hmm… that’s less good, certainly.
Ok, at the opposite end of the expensive spectrum is a new project getting started - the Open Library. This is pretty amazing if they can actually do it - but it hopes to catalog and contain every book ever. Not just organize it and tell you what it is, but actually contain the full text of the books. This probably means just out-of-copyright books since publshers were suing Google just for showing excerpts from their current lineup. Still, it’s pretty amazing and quite ambitious. Good luck to them.
Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon.
Too good to be true, right? Wrong! Researchers have discovered a population of “super-sized chimps“! These Bili apes, eat big cats, sleep on the ground (sometimes) and smash stuff up. They carry termite mounds over to rocks to smash them open. They smash open hard fruit, turtles, errant computers, whatever they want. Pretty awesome, now they just need to get National Geographic down there with some fancy cameras to get some crazy footage.
July 17th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Wouldn’t it be easier for the chimps to bring rocks to the mounds?
July 17th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Dude, their chimps! You’re not questioning their need to break open a termite mound in the first place? ;)
July 17th, 2007 at 8:48 am
I’m not easily impressed. Now, if they found super-sized chimps who had somehow opened their own McDonald’s franchise deep in the remote jungle…
“You want termites with that lion burger?”
July 17th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Yeah, but that’d be slow food, since they have to bring the mounds all the way out to the rocks - it’d take forever and people wouldn’t wait around. Never happen. :)
July 17th, 2007 at 10:04 am
oooh… smashing open termite mound good idea!
me no have to wait for termite to wander into mouth now!
July 17th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Nah, I’ve known chimps eat termites. Normal chimps usually just use a stick, poke it around in a mound, wait for termites to crawl onto it, and then eat ‘em off the stick. That’s been a standard example of tool use amongst non-humans. It just seems odd to me that these He-Man chimps find it easier to break off a termite mound from the ground and then smash it over some rocks instead of just bring a rock or two and smashing the hell out of the termite mound where it stands. Or maybe the termite mounds where they are are nothing like what I have in mind.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
maybe they live in an area with no loose rocks.
or the rocks are super-predators.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:22 am
[...] yesterday I blogged a little bit about super luxury private submarines and how I want one. What I didn’t mention was that the reason I want one was to handle my [...]