The wombat is a large, solitary and nocturnal relative of the koala, native to Australia. It has poor eyesight but an excellent sense of smell, which is its main navigation aid.
It also has a very strange ability under its belt: its shit comes out in cubes. Yep, unlike other animals which produce cylinders (eg. dogs), pleets (eg. rabbits) or splats (eg. cows) the wombat’s turds really are cube-shaped.
Why? Well it seems it is all down to the physiology and motility of their large intestines. But it turns out it is also a useful attribute to have.
Find the full story over on The Conversation.
Anatoliy Omelchenko of Triangle Tree has designed the Edible Spoon Maker.
It works on the toasted sandwich maker principle and allows you to bake your own edible spoons from either home-made or ready prepared dough in only a few minutes.
In this video Omelchenko demonstrates the device using ready-made biscuit dough:
Bored with garden gnomes?
Want something else to cheer up your front garden, and your neighbours?
Well then the AliExpress website has just the thing: erotic nude female statues like this one …
OK, so last Thursday I posed the following problem from Alcuin of York:
A man has to take a wolf, a goat and a bunch of cabbages across a river. The only boat available can accommodate just two of them at a time. It is well known that if left alone together the goat would eat the cabbages, and the wolf would eat the goat; but the man has been ordered to transfer all of them to the other side dry and in good condition. How can he achieve this?
So this is how the man did it …
First take the goat across and leave the wolf and the cabbages behind. Then return (empty) and take the wolf across. Having put the wolf on the other side, take the goat back over (remember, you can’t leave it with the wolf!). Leaving the goat on the near side, take the cabbages across. Then you can return (empty, again) and having picked up the goat take it over once more. You should now have everyone on the far bank, safe and well, and you’ve had some healthy rowing.
How many of you worked that out? Good, well done.
Now the remaining challenge is to return the boat to it’s starting point. Bright ideas on how to do that — without getting wet or damaging your charges?
If you want to know more about Alcuin’s puzzles then Can You Solve Alcuin’s Puzzles? is a good starting point.
Here begin the problems to sharpen the young is the beginning of a wonderful text which it is believed was written by the Carolingian scholar Alcuin of York (c.735–804). The work presents over fifty mathematical puzzles many of which remain a challenge even for modern readers. Here is one of the best known, which you may well have come across before:
A man has to take a wolf, a goat and a bunch of cabbages across a river. The only boat available can accommodate just two of them at a time. It is well known that if left alone together the goat would eat the cabbages, and the wolf would eat the goat; but the man has been ordered to transfer all of them to the other side dry and in good condition. How can he achieve this?
As always there’s no prize other than the satisfaction of solving the puzzle — but do feel free to show off by putting your answer in the comments.
Answer on Sunday evening, as usual.
Oh, and no cheating!
Should you be of a mind, it is quite easy to buy examples of taxidermy: just go to a few local auctions and you’ll soon find all manner of creatures in glass cases.
But you can now go one better: Upholstered Faux Taxidermy Heads and Animals.
American artist Kelly Rene Jelinek fabricates life-sized replicas of taxidermied animal heads using fragments of upholstery fabric. The results are surprisingly modern sculptural objects that mimic traditional anatomical mounts.
See more on Colossal.
Eccentric looks at life through the thoughts of a retired working thinker
