silly fixations- Furby's & Mt. beavers

Reading this week has been a bust, sad to say. Instead I can share some absurd little obsessions that I’ve had this week. One was on Furby's, I read earlier that the NSA banned them from their offices, so I searched a little to see what Furby’s were about. Here’s some very strange tidbits I discovered about Furby’s:


Equipped with a computer chip, sensors and a vocabulary of 200 words of a nonsense language called "Furbish," the slightly sinister-looking animatronic pet responds to touch, sound and movement. Furbys can communicate with each other through infrared signals and can be taught to speak English. Spooky. From idg.net November 24, 1998

Furby resembles an owl, with tufts of hair between its huge pink ears.

"We are prohibited from introducing these items [Furby] into NSA spaces. Those who have should contact their Staff Security Office for guidance," a memo said. CNN
January 13, 1999

Furby autospsy http://www.phobe.com/furby/auto1.html

They are still popular with many hackers as they can be dissected and made to do interesting things, as well as teenage pyromaniacs, who would often burn the devices while listening to them continue to speak their normal language. From Wikipdeia

This site I go to every day, an result of my color obsession. You can create your own little color cell then try to give it more life by choosing it each day- you can also choose other color cells to help give them more life and move up in ranking. Your color cell can even combine with another color cell and have a child. – Color evolution…?

http://colorcell.uneven.org/index2.php


I read a little about Mountain Beavers (Aplodontia rufa) in one of my readings- they are not beavers, nor do they live in the mountain- but here’s some very interesting facts about this strange rodent.


The mountain beaver is not really a true beaver. It's a little-known but fascinating rodent which occupies a unique taxonomic and ecological niche. It lives underground in burrows and is seldom seen above ground. Most people don't even know it exists. Little is known of its ecology.
http://www.infowright.com/mtbeaver/

Biography Aplodontia rufa is the only species and genus in its family with no known living relatives. The species, "is considered the most primitive living rodent, with an ancestry that goes back into the first half of the Tertiary Period (approximately 66 to 3 million years ago), when modern mammals first evolved" (Wilson and Ruff 1999).
http://bss.sfsu.edu/holzman/courses/Fall%2003%20project/mtnbeaver.htm

more
http://www.thewebsiteofeverything.com/animals/mammals/Rodentia/Aplodontidae/Aplodontia/Aplodontia-rufa.html