Happy Bigfoot Day!
Posted: Friday, August 15, 2008 12:57 PM by Will Femia
As you may have heard,
a Bigfoot corpse has been discovered and the details, including DNA information
will be revealed today, just a few short hours from now, at a press conference in California.
Now, you may point out that this isn't the first time such a claim has been made or that the photo of the body looks an awful lot like a gorilla suit in a box but that's no reason to miss the opportunity to indulge in a lot of "If true..." journalism. My favorite part of the coverage of this story is the way the question of the creature and it's description is secondary to whether the "hunters" can produce it. If they don't produce an actual Bigfoot body at the press conference, it's doesn't mean there's no creature, it just means they haven't caught one yet. Anyway, I'd better stop before I get carried away and ruin my paranormal buzz.
And you science bloggers, no ruining the fun this time!ADDING: The Tech section is carrying
the AP story on this so presumably it'll update once the press conference happens. (I helped Helen write
the Newsvine discussion question. :) )
ONE MORE: This is
a pretty thorough debunking but it dates back to before the press conference. It follows the "Halloween costume theory" mentioned in the Cryptomundo link above.
Speaking of questioning whether something is real, I had to ask around about this movie poster for
The Dark Knight Returns coming in 2011 that includes a glimpse of the hand of the Riddler. (We think it's real.)
Did you see this
time line of Internet memes? Note the little plus signs along the line that let you zoom in. Looks like someone is keeping it up to date.
Uni. Washington and Microsoft Research collaborates on (yet another) mindblowing 3D photo viewer - The version of this video
at the University of Washington site has some supplementary material as well. I'm not sure but
this appears to be related (at least in so far as it's from the same university). What's most unexpected about this kind of research is that I generally think of video as being a kind of evolution of the still photo, at least in terms of conveying information. Breaking away from the linearity of video also takes the mind in a new direction (to which the entire community of video game environment designers say, "Duh!")
Hit me later enables you to have your e-mail resent to you at a later time of your choosing. I'm having trouble thinking of how this is better than just ignoring it.
Cancer cured headline of the day:
Patients 'free from cancer' after immune-boost treatment. Well, I guess that's it then.
In the comments of a post from the other day Caren reminded us of the
My Early Muir Owl video (and sent me on a morning digression of watching marriage proposal videos - very heartwarming) in connection with the anamorphosis item. Coincidentally today I ran into what is basically an anamorphosis game called
Coign of Vantage.
In addition to getting a lot of mail about the Bigfoot item, a few folks, aware of my enthusiasm for lightning porn, have sent in links to some version of
this ultra slow motion video of a lightning bolt. I wasn't able to get that BBC video to play, so I don't know how much real time the clip represents but still pretty amazing.
