What! Hybrid Animals?

Yes! You read well, Hybrid Animals! The world in which you and I live in has such thing as a Hybrid animal. When you and I thought that this immense “blue globe” could not get any stranger, abnormal, and full of skepticism, Hybrid animals pop up. This might be a little too off your understanding, but don’t panic, these animals are not as extraordinary as my first to lines make it feel. In fact, Hybrid animals are a type of living creature created by the animals themselves and of course God’s hand. These animals have also been created thanks to artificial insemination (process of fertilizing the female egg by introducing spermatozoid into reproductive track). Anyways, back to the topic, Hybrid animals are rare and you might have a small chance to spot one.

But if you really want to see a Zony (zebra-Pony) or a Wolphin (Bottlenose dolphin- False killer whale) they are easy to find. To do so, you might want to go and search them up online, or you can visit them in Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Tring, England, and Sea Life Park, Hawaii, respectively. Hybrid animals come in large variety, Grolar, Pizzly, Liger, Tigon, Wolf Dog, Iron Age Pig, Zebroid, Cama, Leopon, etc..! Hybrid animals are extraordinary and rare. Think about the names of the different animals above and try to get an idea of how can these animals look, reproduce, act, and even smell, touch, or hear. Above you will see a YouTube video of pictures showing you the different type of Hybrid animals.

By: Jorge Alvarez

Homework!

CC Image courtesy of stuartpilbrow on Flickr

To most of us homework is our nemesis! Homework has now been around over hundreds of years, and somehow, we students still can’t manage to defeat the number one nemesis. Homework is a material representation of a White Shark or King Cobra. Like these animals, Homework attacks with no previous warning. Some of us get around it easily and manage to change it into classwork, or schoolwork. But the people who don’t, have to suffer and sacrifice their precious free time in order to get through this wild untamable beast!

Homework can be long or short, worth it or not, and hard or easy. But one thing homework will never stop being is, a pain in the neck. But it’s not homework itself what made me write this, but the incredible way in which some people manage to get through this abolishment to student community. There are days in which my eyes witness how people finish their work five minutes before class, or even less! It is incredible how the human brain can undergo with pressure and manage to finish a five hour assignment in ten-fifteen minutes.

I ask myself, how can people finish homework before class? My point in all of this is to ask how can homework still be around if we are capable of finishing such thing in such short time? Are we bound to finish homework fast only under a lot of pressure? Or can we exceed our brain capacity and manage to tame this pressure so we can use it every time, to finish our work? Homework, our nemesis!

By: Jorge Alvarez

Justice League VS. Avengers

It is beautiful when characters from different shows cross over into other shows but doing it in your head is much more fun. My favorite battle scenario is the Justice League VS. Avengers. For those of you who do not now the avengers (they are fairly new) they are basically the heroes you have already seen that were not given actual cities to defend. Anyway that scenario is my favorite to think about. The fun thing about this is you get to be as accurate as you want or even use cheats. My cheat is giving Iron man kryptonite so he can kill Superman. Whats your favorite imaginary showdown?

CC courtesy of PopCultureGeek.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/popculturegeek/5580819455/

By Gio Aboujaoude

Funny Kitties

For a long time now, I have been looking at really funny cat videos, and so far this is probably the funniest one I have seen. The people narrating what the cats were saying show us that if you try to "figure out" what animals are saying, it could be really funny. Just like tey did with these cats. If you muted this video what would you think the cats were doing ?

BEWARE OF FUNNYNESS

Anaka Sadler (guest blogger !!!) ☺

Rolling Fall

Online Physics Games

On Tuesday afternoon, rain clouds loomed in the sky, so afternoon volleyball was cancelled. Naturally, many of the students who would have otherwise been playing volleyball came streaming into the computer lab. The games commenced! Hot dog games and stick figure light saber fights and motorcycle races. But the one that interested me the most was that which Cesar was playing: Rolling Fall. It's the one you see above, and the basic idea behind the game is that you must solve increasingly difficult puzzles in which you hit zombies with cannon balls. The rules of the game are all governed by physical laws. The game reminds me a whole lot of Crayon Physics.

I tried desperately to explain to Cesar that he was actually learning about physics as he was playing, but he wouldn't listen. Your blog comments today must do one of two things:

• Either explain a physical law that is at work in this game
• Or, tell me an idea for a very simple game like Rolling Fall that teaches its player as they play

The world's shortest story?

The other day, Monday I think it was, I asked Arielle Garcia what she was looking at on her computer. She replied, "the shortest story in the world." As a Literature teacher by heart and training, this piqued my interest, so I asked her to email it to me:

"When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there."

Great galloping brontosaurus bones! That's an amazing story!!! Turns out it was written by a Guatemalan writer named Augusto Monterroso, and at only eight words long, it very well be the shortest story in the world.

Tell me something that you liked about this story. Why is it a story? What does it mean? If you didn't like it, write a story yourself that is ten words or less in length!

People are awesome.

Watch this video.

What totally fascinates me about the contents of this video is not necessarily the extraordinary feats that these regular people perform. Regular people do extraordinary things all of the time: surgeons repair people's spines, babies learn to walk, artists create masterpieces out of sound and pigment. Those things are really extraordinary to me.

The reason the people in this video are so incredibly interesting to watch is because the people who populate it are all doing acts which require insane amounts of precision. Of course, there may be one or two of the acts that are random flukes, but for the most part these people clearly practiced these activities over and over and over again until they could reproduce the action at will.

My question to you is this:

What do you think motivates a person to learn how to do something as precise as say, do a backflip off a rubber ball, especially when that act clearly has no practical use, and in many cases could easily cause the person great pain and injury if something went wrong?

Props to Luciano Meneses for showing this to me.