Search Results for: overlords

Ah, where to begin today. After the British government attempted to lure women into scientific fields with an ad more demeaning than anything ever released by Victoria’s Secret a group of actual female scientists responded with an ad of their own. Their ad features real scientists having fun with science and dancing to “I’m Sexy and I Know It.” Ladies, there is a career for you in science and it does not require you to do math on a bathroom mirror or wear heels. The fact that I need to point that out simply proves that there is another category where we have a long way to go. Consider it added to my “to do” list. Put it this way, the first video, stripped of its techno soundtrack and embellished with David Lee Roth in his prime would have been great fun on MTV in 1985. Much like Hot for Teacher was in its day. In fact there are a couple of scenes in the first video that appear to have been outtakes from the Van Halen classic. That is not actually a good thing in this case.

This is not to say that science can’t be sexy. Daan Rosengarde has designed the ultimate example of sexy science. He has designed a dress that becomes more and more transparent the more excited a woman gets.

You don’t get to choose whether this dress is revealing or not — your carnal instincts do.

The ‘Intimacy 2.0’ dress, designed by Daan Roosegaarde, is getting a rise out of the fashion world because its opaque fabric becomes transparent when you get aroused. Finally, all the cards will be on the table. You’ll have your date saying, “Is your dress disappearing, or are you just happy to see me?”

The already barely-there garment features ribbons of leather and opaque “e-foils,” which can detect the model’s heartbeat, the Daily Mail reports.

Another caveat: Though Roosegaarde has said he’s “in talks” to produce a ready-to-wear line of Intimacy clothing, the current dress is only a prototype and a project.

Not to be a noodge or rain on anyone’s parade, but doesn’t a heartbeat increase if you see a car crash, hear some exciting music or in any of a hundred other situations? You might find yourself being the hit of the party for all the wrong, yet oh so right, reasons.

So what can I do to get your heartbeat down? Easy. Let’s discuss the joys of whale poop.

What’s yellowish-gray, stinks to high heaven and is worth tens of thousands of dollars per pound?

Just ask Ken Wilman, whose dog Madge went nuts over a dirty old rock the pair found on a lonely, windswept beach near Morecambe, England. But it wasn’t actually a rock: “When I picked it up and smelled it, I put it back down again, and I thought ‘urgh,'” Wilman told the BBC.

Wilman didn’t think much of the strange blob until he got home and, like any enterprising treasure hunter, immediately did a Google search. The chunky object, Wilman learned, was probably a valuable piece of ambergris, which comes from the digestive tract of the sperm whale and is a very expensive ingredient in luxury fragrances such as Chanel No. 5.

Realizing the foul stench emitted by the lump was actually the scent of money, Wilman sprang into action. “When I saw how much it could be worth, I went back to the beach and grabbed it!” Wilman told the Metro.

One French ambergris dealer has already offered Wilman $68,000 for his beach find, though it’s probably worth much more. “It’s quite a find,” Chris Hill, curator at the Aquarium of the Lakes in Cumbria, England, told the Mirror.

“There are places in Europe that will buy it from you,” Hill said. “They will age it, like a fine wine, and then test it for perfume. “How much it’s worth will depend on how fresh it is, but it’s potentially $180,000.”

Despite the centuries-old passion for ambergris, nobody’s really certain how the sperm whale produces it, or how the whale excretes the lump.

Most experts agree that whales create ambergris inside their intestines as a kind of fatty coating around sharp, hard-to-digest items, like the beaks of giant squid (a favorite food of the whale), the BBC reports. And squid beaks have been found inside pieces of ambergris.

But while some reports call ambergris “whale vomit,” others insist it’s not puke. “It’s poop,” molecular biologist Christopher Kemp told ABC News.

Kemp, the author of “Floating Gold: the Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris” (University Of Chicago Press, 2012), notes that the stuff commands a high price because “only one percent of the 350,000 sperm whales can actually make it,” he told ABC News. “Because it’s so rare, it’s very valuable.”

Fearing a flood of fortune hunters looking for ambergris, local authorities in Morecambe are now warning beachcombers of some potential risks involved in their search.

“The tide comes in so very quickly that it catches people unaware,” Mike Guy, manager of lifeboat operations for Morecambe, told the BBC. “We’re really worried about people just wandering off on the beach searching for ambergris. They’re very, very unlikely to find any because it’s very rare.”

Just when you think that people getting killed hunting pythons was the dumbest way to die ever invented, along comes a group who could die hunting whale poop. A quick update on the python hunt. As of this writing there have been over 1,000 hunters and under 50 pythons killed. Many humans have suffered various injuries but no fatalities yet.

This is like a real life episode of Benny Hill.

So, what to do about all of this? Well, the best solution I can see is robots. Unfortunately, as Jerremy Hsu points out, robots are meant to be feared and some may want to kill us.

Metal Madness
Real robot names such as Roomba and Asimo don’t evoke as much fear as the fictional “Terminator.” But consider that Roomba, the automated vacuum cleaner, is manufactured by iRobot, creator also of armed robot warriors for the U.S. military. And Asimo represents just the first wave of an incoming tsunami of robots that strive to look and act eerily human.

It goes beyond automated vacuums and mildly entertaining dance-bots. Japan and Korea plan to deploy humanoid robots to care for the elderly, while the United States already fields thousands of robot warriors on the modern battlefield. Meanwhile, plenty of people have enhanced their bodies technologically in ways that bring them closer to their robotic brethren.

So it’s OK to become a bit of a paranoid android, because many experts say that the robotic future is rapidly approaching, if not already here. Robots probably won’t completely take over or annihilate the human race anytime soon, but they may supplant us by other means — and LiveScience is here to count the reasons why you need not hide your fear of the metal ones.

Your Grandkids Will Be Robots
Whether humans and robots fight or make love, the most probable scenario involves marching toward a convergence point in the future. On one hand, humans continue to add more technological gizmos and tiny computers to their daily wear. You can already see many such 21st-century cyborgs playing around with their iPhones, or staring off into the distance with earbuds piping music into their heads. Artificial limbs, organs and bionic eyes? Check. Coming from the other direction, robots have steadily improved in almost every possible way: walking, talking and learning. Man and machine increasingly look alike, and at some point the difference may not exist. But on a brighter note, humans won’t worry so much about robots once they’ve merged with them. See you on the other side.

Robots Take Our Jobs
Anything you can do, they can do better. Well, lots of things, anyway. Modern humans have not gone obsolete just yet, but robots have already found their place as space explorers that can endure harsh environments off and on Earth. They have also brought their tireless efficiency to everything from assembly line work to humdrum gene sequencing in labs, and have appeared in growing numbers on real-life battlefields — although the latter can lead to the different problem if robots stage a rebellion, or even just have a weapons malfunction. For now, robots complement rather than replace elements of the human workforce and armed forces due to limits on their intelligence. But they’re evolving quickly, and a few have even begun tinkering with science themselves.

Robot Insurrection: Kill All Humans
A scenario where machines rise up against their makers presents perhaps the least appealing convergence of science fiction and real life. That doesn’t mean preliminary signs of an incipient insurrection don’t exist, though. Thousands of drones and ground robots have been deployed by many nations, and particularly the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. An automatic antiaircraft gun killed human soldiers on its own when it malfunctioned during a South African training exercise. Military researchers refer to “Terminator” scenarios, and seriously discuss how armed robots are changing the rules and ways of modern war. If that’s not enough to make you a bit leery, consider that Great Britain has established a network of satellites for the purpose of coordinating all those drones and other military assets. It shares the same name as a certain villainous artificial intelligence that dominates the “Terminator” movies — Skynet.

Humans May Prefer Robot Lovers
Experts aren’t wondering if humans will ever make love to robots — they’re already discussing what happens when that day comes. It may sound snicker-worthy, but consider that many people have had online relationships that get pretty intimate through Internet chat rooms and participate in socially intense massively multiplayer online games for years. A flesh-and-steel robot that feels, looks and sounds like a human would have even greater appeal, robotics researchers say. And if history serves as any guide, you don’t need the perfect Stepford Wife to tempt spouses or significant others into a little robotic addiction and strain existing human relationships.

Robots Steal Our Hearts
Robots don’t need to take over by force, if humans have already fallen for their cute, clumsy antics. Blame the human brain for allowing toddlers and soldiers alike to feel warm fuzzy feelings for robots. People are hardwired to perceive faces and get emotional about almost everything, whether it’s a stuffed animal or a car. However, robots still have to navigate one tricky obstacle of the mind — the “Uncanny Valley” phenomenon where a robot looks almost human, save for a bizarre twitch or stutter or glassy-eyed stare which can creep people out. Many researchers currently try to bypass the issue by simply designing robots to look less human, and retain that clunky robotic cuteness

Number 5 is Alive!!!

If you know that phrase you know how cute our eventual overlords can be.

And, yes, you read that article correctly. The nice people who build your vacuum are the same people who build death dealing cyber warriors. Bonus for you? Most of the technology is interchangeable. It would take no effort at all to make your vacuum cleaner kill you in your sleep..

How’s your heart rate now?

Robots of Brixton from Kibwe Tavares on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

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I have written about the joys of our impending robot overlords. The sex bots are the good news, the biological slave camps are the bad. But, hey, why should we worry? It isn’t like science is anywhere close to developing a true artificial brain or anything like that. Actually, given the fact that college entrance exams can be filled in using 140 characters or less, I sincerely doubt there are any humans capable of doing the requisite math. And given that there are schools offering degrees in how to use cardboard boxes, you would think we would be safe from impending robot overlords. But there’s always that one kid. The Bill Gates in his garage or the Steve Jobs in his whatever it is Steve Jobs hid in to escape his teenage years. There’s always that one really smart person who refuses to be held back by silly things like societal norms.

Sebastian Anthony reports that a small group of Canadian terrorists, a/k/a brilliant scientists, have built an artificial brain.

And not just to be a dinning alternative for the zombie apocalypse.

A group of neuroscientists and software engineers at the University of Waterloo in Canada are claiming to have built the world’s most complex, large-scale model simulation of the human brain. The simulated brain, which runs on a supercomputer, has a digital eye which it uses for visual input, a robotic arm that it uses to draw its responses — and it can pass the basic elements of an IQ test.

The brain, called Spaun (Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network), consists of 2.5 million simulated neurons, allowing it to perform eight different tasks. These tasks range from copy drawing to counting, to question answering and fluid reasoning. At this point, you should watch the video below to get a rough idea of how Spaun works — and then read on to find out why Spaun is so interesting.

Now, the nitty-gritty details. Spaun has a 28×28 (784-pixel) digital eye, and a robotic arm which can write on some paper. Every interaction with Spaun is through its 784-pixel eye. The scientists flash up a bunch of numbers and letters, which Spaun reads into memory, and then another letter or symbol acts as the command, telling Spaun what to do with its memory. The output of the task is then inscribed by the robotic arm.

Spaun’s brain consists of 2.5 million neurons that are broken down into a bunch of simulated cranial subsystems, including the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus, which are wired together with simulated neurons that very accurately mimic the wiring of a real human brain. The basic idea is that these subsystems behave very similarly to a real brain: Visual input is processed by the thalamus, the data is stored in the neurons, and then the basal ganglia fires off a task to a part of the cortex that’s designed to handle that task.

All of this computation is performed in a physiologically accurate way, with simulated voltage spikes and neurotransmitters. Even the limitations of the human brain are simulated, as you can see in the video below, with Spaun struggling to store more than a few numbers in its short-term memory.

The end result is a brain that is mechanistically simple (2.5 million neurons isn’t really much to write home about), but which is surprisingly flexible. By implementing just a handful of very basic tasks, it’s interesting to see how complex behavior begins to emerge. There are some tantalizing hints as to how the brain evolved: starting with simple tasks, and then building upon and weaving them together to build complex functionality. In the video below, Spaun recognizes the pattern of a number sequence — the kind of question you would find on an actual IQ test.

Moving forward, the research team, led by Chris Eliasmith, wants to imbue Spaun with adaptive plasticity — the ability to rewire its neurons and learn new tasks simply by doing, rather than being pre-programmed. As for the ultimate end goal, Eliasmith is excited about Spaun’s prospects. “It lets us understand how the brain, the biological substrate, and behavior relate. That’s important for all sorts of health applications,” he says in an interview with PopSci. In testing he has “killed” synthetic neurons and watched performance degrade, which could provide an interesting insight into natural aging and degenerative disorders.

Spaun is built upon Nengo, a graphical open-source software package for building simulated neural systems. You can actually download the Spaun neural model, if you want to simulate your own brain — though I suspect it might require a little more processing power than your desktop PC.

Ah yes, Spaun, rhymes with Spawn. As in Hell Spawn. What could possibly go wrong?

Well as it turns out, a little more than you might have thought. You see every digital interface has to have a way in and out to adjust programming. And to create the digital interface they have, they need to map the human brain. Naturally, you knew this was coming, hackers have now found a way to hack into your brain.

With a chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerability in your brain. Using a commercial off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it’s possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you’d rather keep secret.

As we’ve covered in the past, a brain-computer interface is a two-part device: There’s the hardware — which is usually a headset (an EEG; an electroencephalograph) with sensors that rest on your scalp — and software, which processes your brain activity and tries to work out what you’re trying to do (turn left, double click, open box, etc.) BCIs are generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but in the last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300, you can buy an Emotiv or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process, and begin mind controlling your computer.

Both of these commercial BCIs have an API — an interface that allows developers to use the BCI’s output in their own programs. In this case, the security researchers — from the Universities of Oxford and Geneva, and the University of California, Berkeley — created a custom program that was specially designed with the sole purpose of finding out sensitive data, such as the location of your home, your debit card PIN, which bank you use, and your date of birth. The researchers tried out their program on 28 participants (who were cooperative and didn’t know that they were being brain-hacked), and in general the experiments had a 10 to 40% chance of success of obtaining useful information (pictured above).

P300 responseTo extract this information, the researchers rely on what’s known as the P300 response — a very specific brainwave pattern (pictured right) that occurs when you recognize something that is meaningful (a person’s face), or when you recognize something that fits your current task (a hammer in the shed). The researchers basically designed a program that flashes up pictures of maps, banks, and card PINs, and makes a note every time your brain experiences a P300. Afterwards, it’s easy to pore through the data and work out — with fairly good accuracy — where a person banks, where they live, and so on.

The security researchers’ brain hacking setupIn a real-world scenario, the researchers foresee a game that is specially tailored by hackers to extract sensitive information from your brain — or perhaps an attack vector that also uses social engineering to lull you into a false sense of security. It’s harder to extract data from someone who knows they’re being attacked — as interrogators and torturers well know.

Moving forward, this brain hack can only improve in efficacy as BCIs become cheaper, more accurate, and thus more extensively used. Really, your only defense is to not think about the topic — but if you’re proactively on the defensive, then the hacker has already messed up. The only viable solution that I can think of is to ensure that you don’t use your brain-computer interface with shady software, brain malware — but then again, in a science-fictional future, isn’t it almost guaranteed that the government would mandate the inclusion of brain-hacking software in the operating system itself?

Seriously, for less than the cost of a weekend vacation you can hack into a human brain.

I’m sure everything will be just fine.

I’m also sure the bunnies in my head know how to make the perfect martini.

Good Books “Metamorphosis” from Antfood

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Before we get to the meat and potatoes of today’s blog, I’d like to take a moment to add another log to the “What the hell were they thinking” fire. Principal Janet Jones, of Utica High School, yanked a 14 year old girl, who was wearing a pirate costume for Halloween, into her office and informed her that she “looked like a porn star.” When the girl, who comes from a connservative family, asked “what’s a porn star” she received a VERY graphic answer. So now the young lady’s father is upset and parading around town with a trailer that sports the nifty saying “Mrs. Jones taught my daughter about porn. ‘All men watch porn.'” Mrs. Jones also added a “grow up” admonition to her screed. And while this situation is spiraling out of control with citizens taking sides and refusing to budge, to the detriment of the young woman’s psyche, the school system is backing the principal by saying she fosters a “positive learning environment.” Add Utica to my personal “do not fly list” and move on.

Oh, the costume? On a 14 year old girl it’s cute. On your 25 year old girlfriend, it’s smoking hot. The same as with Catholic school girl outfits. If you get those confused you can, and should, end up in prison.

Okay, moving on. Some of you may have heard that Mitt Romney did not win the presidential election. There may be a downside to that. Back in 2008 a group of Mormon moms advocated a new Olympic sport: “Pole dancing for Jesus.” Considering that he didn’t even get the vote of Mormon moms, the Salt Lake City Tribune endorsed President Obama, my guess is that he would have used his many Olympic connections to make that happen. Just in case you were still looking for anything positive that might have come from his presidency.

Quick question for FOX! News; why is it Mr. Obama yet President Bush? Just curious.

Anyway, once again, the World Pole Dancing Championships were held without Mormons in Zurich, Switzerland. And, once again, Americans were shut out of the top prizes.

After Americans went to the polls, the rest of the world went to the poles — for the World Pole Dancing Championships this past weekend in Zurich, Switzerland.

Dancers from 26 countries did what they could do to raise the bar for the sport, which has become as popular in gyms as it has in exotic night clubs.

Some say the physical act of climbing and twirling around a pole has roots in the Chinese circus, according to PolicyMic.com. Back then, it was performed by men more than women.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that pole dancing moved into gentlemen’s clubs.

Because of pole dancing’s Asian roots, the Chinese pole dancing team had high hopes to win big in Zurich, according to GlobalTimes.

Instead, the country remains the sport’s sleeping giant. The competition was dominated by Russian and Ukraine dancers, including Ukraine’s own Natalia Tatarintseva, the top female, according to HuffPost UK.

You would think, with the fact that the Tampa area alone employs over 2,000 strippers and pole dancers, that one might be worthy of international competition. Then again, I once got stuck in Oneonta, New York, and saw the worst strippers ever. It was a couple of girls who seem to have finished their day as cashiers at WalMart and just wandered in and got naked. They had the sexy moves of beached walruses.

And I owe an apology to the walruses.

But, as bad as that news is for Americans, I have worse news for men in general. Scientists say that women who have sex with robots live longer, and happier lives.

Could sex with robots help extend human life spans? Some futurists seem to think so.

A Nov. 7 article on the futurist website Transhumanity argues that robot lovers could help extend life spans by giving users mind-blowing “longevity orgasms” far superior in quality to those from human “meat-bag” partners.

Warning: Graphic Descriptions Follow

The link between orgasms and health is not unexplored. Some have argued that orgasms have significant health benefits, and “The Longevity Project,” a book about an eight-decade study of long-life factors, observed that women with higher frequency of orgasm during sex lived longer.

But assuming robots can do it better than humans, is there necessarily a correlation between the quality of orgasm and longevity? Or is frequency of climax the most important factor?

If the latter is the case, then a sex robot’s superior skills in the sack might be less of a game changer than the fact that a sexbot will never be too tired or unwilling to get it on.

Still, the futurist scouting report on longevity orgasms sounds pretty complex.

Transhumanity elaborates:

“[Sexbots will] be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices… They’ll offer us quadruple-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat silky fellatio, deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage & prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with scented lubes.”

At the moment, it appears humanity will have to wait and see if “shrieking, frothy, bug-eyed, amnesia-inducing orgasms” administered by sex robots provide the key to longevity.

But it won’t have to wait too long. A scenario envisioned by Victoria University researchers plots the rise of robot prostitutes by 2050, the Dominion Post notes.

Mid-century was also the sexbot timeframe given by artificial intelligence expert Dr. Robert Levy in his book, “Love and Sex With Robots,” which postulates that it would be entirely possible for humans to fall in love with their robotic partners.

Well, you can’t say I haven’t warned you that this was going to happen. Time and time again I have railed against our impending robot overlords. And what thanks to do I get? I get replaced by 2 D batteries and some attachments.

Gee. Thanks.

Well, America, we once led the free world and can again. Get your sisters, moms, wives, mistresses and/or girlfriends, sexed up and ready to rock. Get them a pole in the living room so they can practice and practice until it hurts and then go reclaim our national honor in Switzerland.

And when they’re done you can rub them down, oil them up and ….. well, reclaim that glory as well.

Try and replace me with batteries will they? I’ll show them.

gisele-pole dancing from Michael Wilkes Photography on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

It’s been a rough week. By the time you read this the Obama / Romney debates will have happened, 13 more parodies of Gangam Style will have ben released and one, at least, will feature someone naked claiming to be an artist in their own right. Don’t let them confuse you. They will be wrong. Your email will have been filled, yet again, with emails loudly proclaiming that President Obama is a Muslim terrorist (with one or more words spelled wrong) or that Governor Romney is a robotic unicorn (with one or more words spelled wrong). Of course sane people know that neither is true and that world peace will come from Muslim unicorns and Armageddon will come via robot terrorists. The Internet confuses people. And, just as Aristophanes once famously said, “It must be true if you read t on the Internet” there are websites devoted to making you think you’re right. He just neglected to include the sarcasm smiley so people would know he was kidding. Such a kidder that Aristophanes.

Anyway, you’ve been through a lot. It’s my job, from time to time, to lighten your mood. So I did some research to find out what people really want out of the greatest source of raw data ever conceived. Is it texts related to religious history? Is it fact finding to see what foods are healthy for their children? Maybe people are looking for alternatives to traditional vacation plans and are searching out international penis festivals. Or were people clamoring for ways to use the word “Bootylicious” when referring to disease spreading flies. Nope. None of that crap. What people want is pictures of cats. And then, once those are exhausted, they want more pictures of cats.

People are shallow and dumb.

But, people read my blog so that means, once in a while, I need to write something they like or will care about. So, today, I give you dead cats.

We start with a kitty named Ni Hao who stowed away on board a Chinese freighter and went without food or water for three weeks.

Here is the law of threes that any doctor can tell you about;

YOU WILL DIE AFTER:
3 minutes without air
3 days without water
3 weeks without food
3 months without sex

Now that you know that, let’s read about the dead cat from China.

A stowaway kitten who survived a three-week ocean voyage from China to California trapped in a storage container without food or water has found a new home.

Los Angeles County animal control officials said Friday that the cat, which has been named Ni Hao (NEE’ how) or “hello” in Chinese, will leave the animal hospital he’s called home since turning up in the U.S. last month to start life next week with a family in the LA suburb of Redondo Beach.

The family has not been further identified, but officials say it was chosen from more than 80 serious candidates who applied to adopt the stowaway.

The now 5-month-old kitten was found July 11.

It couldn’t walk, see, or make any sounds.

An officer said the kitten had shallow breathing and was “curled up in a ball with his eyes shut,” said animal control official Aaron Reyes.

“And he actually appeared deceased,” he added said.

The cat was rushed to a care center where veterinarians say he has thrived.

The only lingering sign of trauma is a limp, which Reyes describes as “his own strut.”

The kitten suffered considerable muscle atrophy on the journey, causing him to walk with a ginger, unusual gait, Reyes said.

Ni Hao is “still a bit wobbly” and “may end up being a special needs kitty for life,” said Reyes, deputy director of the county’s animal control department.

But, Reyes said, “he’s gone from this shriveled up little kitten with shallow breathing and knocking on death’s door to this curious, playful, bouncy, affectionate, patient, little furry kitty.”

Ni Hao created a media buzz while at the center. Dozens of news outlets from all over the globe have visited. At one time, there were so many requests, the shelter set up a media day to handle them all.

County shelter workers have a couple of theories to explain how Ni Hao survived, Reyes said. They think he ate or drank something just before wandering into the container, he said, or “he is so young his resilience is off the charts.”

Do they have to use Mao to Mao resuscitation to save a Chinese cat?

Oh, read a book damnit.

Moving on, not all of our dead cats today are sneaky foreigners attempting to circumvent our sacred borders so they can live off our free, God given, kibble and never pay taxes. No, some are from Ohio. Which is kind of the same but Ohio is the home of Devo and not the bizarre hairless monkey people. Use the links if you’re not sure which is which.

An Ohio woman says the pet cat that sneaked into her luggage for a flight to Florida has returned home safely and seems relatively unaffected by his surprise vacation in Orlando.

Ethel Maze tells The Circleville Herald (http://bit.ly/RmaZfy ) that Bob-Bob the stowaway spent 10 hours in a suitcase before she opened it last week. She says he was lethargic and wet from perspiration, and she initially thought he’d died.

Eventually he perked up, and he spent the week in a crate at Maze’s hotel. He rode in a carrier near Maze’s seat for the return flight.

Somehow the cat had made it through screening at Port Columbus International Airport. The man who handled the bags for Maze’s group told reporters he thought he saw the bag move but loaded it anyway.

The TSA just keeps getting better and better doesn’t it? We might be better off if we were defended by the hairless monkey people,

“Hey Bobby Jo, is it okay if the luggage is squirming?”

“Heck yeah, TJ. Why not? Umm, what’s ‘squirming’ mean?”

But some cats did not need to bypass billions of dollars worth of high tech security to seek the afterlife. No, sometimes all they need is an uptown girl and a Volvo.

A woman says a 6-week-old kitten hitched a ride on the outside of her vehicle as she drove about 100 miles over upstate New York roads.

Stacey Pulsifer tells the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh (http://bit.ly/Q4LJeX ) that she recently drove from her home in Plattsburgh to Elizabethtown in the Adirondacks, then back to her apartment. Along the way she stopped for coffee and heard meowing coming from her Jeep.

She asked two friends to help her search the vehicle. They finally found the kitten wedged behind a bumper and had to cut it free.

Pulsifer has since adopted the hitchhiker and named it Pumpkin. She estimates the lucky black cat was lodged in the car for about 22 hours and traveled some 100 miles. She suffered a broken paw during the ride.

AWWWW.

Okay, so all our dead cats today ended up living. Sorry about that.

But, what if you do have a dead cat? What to do? One U.S. company suggests cat jerky.

Welcome to Kitty Beef, your online Premium Cat Meat Supermarket, where you can order your meat, and have it delivered in vacuum sealed freshness directly to your door. We provide top quality meat and stand by all our products.

For the last 9 years Puppy Beef has been the world’s leading dog meat distributor. We now have 4 free range cat farms supplying the world’s most premium grade cat meat to over 10 countries and bring you KittyBeef. We have established a reputation for having only the highest quality cat meat products and dedicated customer service representatives. Because we only cater to a select group of people, we try to keep a close relationship with all of our customers.

This allows us to help you get the best quality cat meat for your budget, and ship it right to your front door. And after 9 years of business, you can now access our products and services online!

If you”re more of a DIY sort, you can always hop up to How to Cook Cats for some easy to follow recipes.

One of those last two links is meant to be funny. The other is 100% real.

Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs from Julie Jackson on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

You, being a sane and rational person, rarely take talk of impending apocalypses very seriously. You are of a mind that rational people will work things out. And, in the main, history has proven you right. Granted, sometimes, it has taken rational people and a well trained army, but still, in the end everything worked out. So when I write about our eventual enslavement by our robot overlords and the like, you smile and then go have another latte. Sometimes you even send me a funny email. That’s very nice of you by the way. And when I mention that scientists, far too long at play in the fields of the Lord, have decided to build the world a singing mouse, you don’t panic, but you do make sure you have some of those lethal mouse traps. Simply put, you are a person of infinite jest, Horatio, and it takes a bit to get you riled up.

Fact: If all the bees disappeared humanity would die within four years. That’s how long it would take for all the food to disappear from lack of pollenization and for us to starve.

Fact: Bees are disappearing at an alarming rate due to pollution infesting their pollen.

Fact: Zombie bees have been discovered in Washington state.

Feel free to run screaming from the room and then start stocking up on perishables. It may buy you an extra month or so after the world dies.

Washington state’s first “zombie bees” have been reported in Kent.

Novice beekeeper Mark Hohn returned home from vacation a few weeks ago to find many of his bees either dead or flying in jerky patterns and then flopping on the floor. He later learned they had a parasite that causes bees to fly at night and lurch around erratically until they die.
The infection is called “zombie bees.”

“I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house,” Hohn told The Seattle Times.

San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik discovered the infection in California in 2008.

Hafernik now uses a website to recruit citizen scientists like Hohn to track the infection across the country. Observers have found zombie bees in California, Oregon, South Dakota and, now, Washington.

Zombie bees also are being studied by Steve Sheppard, chairman of the entomology department at Washington State University.

The infection is another threat to bees that are needed to pollinate crops. Hives have been failing in recent years due to a mysterious ailment called colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die.

Hohn had remembered hearing about zombie bees, so when he discovered the dead bees at his 1.25-acre spread, he collected several of the corpses and popped them into a plastic bag. About a week later, Hohn had evidence his bees were infected — the pupae of parasitic flies.

The life cycle of the fly that infects zombie bees is reminiscent of the movie “Alien,” the Times reported. A small adult female lands on the back of a honeybee and injects eggs into the bee’s abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots.

“They basically eat the insides out of the bee,” Hafernik said.

After consuming their host, the maggots pupate, forming a hard outer shell that looks like a fat, brown grain of rice. That’s what Hohn found in the plastic bag with the dead bees. Adult flies emerge in three to four weeks.

There’s no evidence yet that the parasitic fly is a major player in the bees’ decline, but it does seem the pest is targeting new hosts, Sheppard said. “It may occur a lot more widely than we think.”

That’s what Hafernik hopes to find out with his website, zombeewatch.org. The site offers simple instructions for collecting suspect bees, watching for signs of parasites and reporting the results.

Once more people start looking here, the number of sightings will probably climb, Hohn said.
“I’m pretty confident I’m not the only one in Washington state who has them,” he said.

When you go to Zom Bee Watch you will see a map. It is a very nice map, very well laid out. It has nice colors and easy to understand symbols and clear definitions of what the symbols mean. Just in case you have vision problems they were kind enough to include a link to a full screen version of it as well.

You will quickly learn that Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, South Dakota, Indiana, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and New York either are infested or have shown enough wanring signs to warrant sampling.

That’s a little over a fifth of our country by area.

And it’s just the beginning.

Insecticides, water pollution, air pollution and genetically altered crops that poison the insects or, at the least, prevent them from pollinating the next plant, are all partially to blame for the decline of bees.

The Zombees are just a bonus to hurry us along so that we can shake off this mortal coil once and for all.

Vanishing of the Bees – Trailer from Bee The Change on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.