Two fishermen claim to have been lost at sea for 25 days, after their fishing boat sank with 18 of their fellow crew members. If not for charitable fishing birds, who vomited life-saving fish (perhaps directly into the fishermen’s mouths) they would surely have died. There is a deep schadenfreude element to laughing at this story, but the image I have in my mind is pretty strange.
Two Myanmar fishermen who claimed to have survived on rainwater and fish regurgitated by birds while lost at sea for 25 days remained in Australian detention Wednesday as officials tried to verify their story.
Ko Ko Oo, 22, and Haung Htaik, 24, were rescued by helicopter from the waters off northern Australia on Saturday after being found floating in a bathtub-sized cooler. They were treated for dehydration at an Australian hospital and released Tuesday.
The pair told authorities that they had been drifting since their fishing boat sank on Dec. 23 with the likely loss of 18 Thai and Myanmar crew.
…continuing…
Oo told Wednesday’s edition of The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper that he and Htaik ate nothing for the first 10 days of their ordeal.
“Then two big seabirds came and vomited some small fish – about six or seven little fish, and that’s all,” Oo told the newspaper through an interpreter.
It’s really amazing to me that animals – huge birds, in this case – would help out another species in need. Simply detecting that another species is “in trouble” is pretty special, but what would motivate one animal to help another? I think this speaks to a certain mistaken assumption that competition is a natural tendency, or even a defining characteristic, of life on Earth. The very suggestion that we humans must tear each other down to get ahead rings somewhat hollow, when presented with insanely bizarre examples of animals behaving in unexpectedly helpful ways. Say what you will about “bird brains” but this is surprisingly sophisticated behavior.
Yes, I am linking bird vomit with a deeper universal message of human charitably, and yes, it works.
DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn’t it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it’s easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.
The first thing to know is that the mind isn’t a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn’t real – tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.
The reasoning goes: if people are getting cheap, wild thrills from a ping-pong ball taped to their eyes, then there’s something that just ain’t right about it… and we should probably protect our kids from it! After all, Internet Blogs are making such fantastical claims that the average teenager will be unable to resist. I submit, for your revulsion, the following excerpt from the blog called RTFA:
Yes kids, you too can start “tripping balls” (ed: this is what kids are calling it these days) thereby experiencing wild, sensory-deprivation effects as you zonk out on an intergalactic space cruise.
…but such sensational claims are never accompanied by responsible warnings: if you get too “far out” you might never come back… perhaps you wear your ping pong balls to work one day, thereby interfering with your ability to type… or you might try “tripping balls” while driving, which will interfere with your reaction time and might lead to a fatal car crash. You might even go blind – or at least fail eye exams – if you keep these ping pong balls on your eyes all the time. Will this nation stand for such cheap and shallow shortcuts to enlightenment?
You have been warned, and the following is just a taste of what you can look forward to. Ah-hahaha! POWER TOOLS ARE ZOMBIE REPELLENT!
Okay… Good fun… But seriously, Mind Hacks have been all the rage for several years, and the Boston Globe has stepped up to the plate with a bite-sized, infographic introduction to hacking your gray matter.
The tape “X”s over them actually ruins the effect. The idea is to have a uniform field thus the sacades (small motions) of your eye no longer introduce any change and very quickly, everything becomes a uniform gray. If you try this, and use a strongly colored light (blue for example), it will turn gray until there is a change (like moving your hand in front of the light) which will cause it to pop back to blue. Kinda fun.
Also, don’t use the half of the ping pong ball that has writing on it – so you actually need two.
TASTELESS, colourless, odourless and painful, pure capsaicin is a curious substance. It does no lasting damage, but the body s natural response to even a modest dose such as that found in a chili pepper is self-defence: sweat pours, the pulse quickens, the tongue flinches, tears may roll. But then something else kicks in: pain relief. The bloodstream floods with endorphins-the closest thing to morphine that the body produces. The result is a high. And the more capsaicin you ingest, the bigger and better it gets.
Which is why the diet in the rich world is heating up. Hot chilies, once the preserve of aficionados with exotic tastes for cuisine from places such as India, Thailand or Mexico, are now a staple ingredient in everything from ready meals to cocktails.
Wait for it …
Among other things, that may give a scientific explanation for the habit, not formally researched, of snorting the “pink fix” (a mixture of cocaine and chili powder).
Crikey!
This is a fabulously informative and interesting article; all “heat geeks” must RTFA. In addition to describing the neural pathways and scientific studies regarding our perception of spicy foods, the article is chock full of hilarious tidbits and has good external links.
We’re nearing the end of a long campaign season in which every factor under the sun has come into play: Issues of age, race, gender, experience/inexperience. Round and round it goes, how it ends, nobody knows. At least one of the candidates on the ticket is not leaving anything up to chance. Famously superstitious, John McCain avoids taking salt shakers handed to him, tossing his hat on a bed, or commenting on his prospects without touching wood. An aide always has his lucky pen at the ready. And, a confirmed triskaidekophobe, he always carries 31 cents in his pocket that’s 13 backwards – in lucky coins. Also, since his campaign headquarters happened to be on the 13th floor of an Arlington, VA office building, he renamed the floor. He’s a powerful guy. It’s the “M” floor now.
It appears to be human nature to believe our thoughts, our words, or our rituals can influence remote outcomes. Yet in his classic 1948 paper on the subject, “‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon,” B.F. Skinner revealed that superstition isn’t particularly human at all (Skinner, 1948). If you put a hungry pigeon inside a box that automatically dispenses food at regular intervals, a funny thing happens: After a while, the pigeon will acquire some sort of idiosyncratic behavior or tic — perhaps spinning in circles, or bobbing its head rhythmically, or some other strange, random, senseless behavior. In effect, the pigeon has developed a superstition about the source of the food and behaves just like a baseball player before a big game or a candidate before an election: just doing whatever it thinks it takes to guarantee a good outcome.
This article has it all: Interesting tidbits about McCain’s attempts to grab fate by the reins, among other notable figures (such as Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager), and a mini-history of so-called “lucky” rituals and supposed curses in the wild world of sports. Mostly, however, this is a well-written and info-packed article reviewing cognitive, social cognitive, and neuroscientific research related to why humans rely on superstitious reasoning.
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