XKCD is a superb webcomic (although pretty geeky) that I follow religiously. I recently came across this one which I found funny.

I thought it was pretty random so I Googled the incident and it turns out that Jimmy Carter was indeed ‘attacked’ by a swimming swamp rabbit in 1979! Read about it in the Wikipedia article: Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident. There are also links to more detail.

Jimmy Carter stares at the crazed swamp rabbit that he had just fought off. Carter was out fishing alone when the swamp rabbit swam towards him and tried desperately to enter the boat. Mr President was forced to fend it off with an oar. Not sure that I believe this - but it does seem to be legit…

Placebos work remarkably well - a lot of the time people aren’t really sick. I’m reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin at the moment (seems pretty good) and one of the characters is a doctor on a Greek island occupied during WW2. He notes that in hard times (occupation) suddenly the islanders have far fewer medical complaints. They have something else to concentrate on!

So I find it pretty cool that this company is selling Placebo tablets in a very official looking container. The product is called Obelcap (You see they did there? Placebo backwards. Sneaky) and is described as “Delicious pharmaceutical grade natural cherry chewable tablets” Useful.

This must have been pretty freaky. It seems that the pachyderm is in a rather ‘friendly’ mood if you know what I mean - still scary though…

Click for a larger view of the image - the guys expression is pretty cool and you can see what he is looking at

NewScientist has an awesome headline on one of it’s stories today: “Great tits enjoying the warmer weather”. I think that one might get quite a lot of traffic…

Anyway, the article is actually about how a species of birds in the UK known as great tits have responded to global warming by laying their eggs earlier. They need to time their laying pretty precisely and over the last 30 years their laying has shifted 2 weeks earlier in the spring.

So here is that picture of some young great tits:

I like this photo. At first I didn’t realise what was going on, but it shows the tracks of a rabbit moving across some snow when BAM an owl nails it. You can see the wings of the attacking bird imprinted in the snow - and no more rabbit tracks…

I don’t want to further confuse people about the concepts of evolution, but this is kinda funny…

This is really cool…

This is actually the philosophy of a remarkably high percentage of the world!

Link from Photo Basement

Here is an report about a dummy tourist in Australia who spotted a 4m saltwater croc approaching his boat. He wanted a good photo with the thing so he leaned out of his boat and started “teasing it”. Long story short, he got his good picture but almost lost an arm! Stupid…

I recently found three blog postings with some pretty cool photos:

• 20 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Angle
• 20 More Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Angle
• 25 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Time

There are a few rubbish pics, but most of them are worth a look (note that you may have seen some of these in forwarded mails). Here are some of my favorites to whet your appetite.