In Which Andres Gallaraga Shows Up In Unexpected Places

An off duty police officer in Scotland was filmed some of the best ever evidence of a panther sized black cat roaming the countryside near Argyll, Scotland. For any cryptozoology enthusiast, it’s a real treat – see it on BBC here.

Alien Big Cat enthusiasts in the UK have to be jumping for joy at the release of the video, which is essentially the Grail of big cat sightings. It’s steady and clear, comes from a reliable source, and most importantly, it offers clear, verifiable landmarks that can confirm the size of the creature in the video. Researchers claim that the animal shown is more than four feet long, significantly too big to be a domestic animal. It’s also pretty small for a big cat, though, which may mean it’s either a young specimen or a hybrid, the offspring of one of the big cats that are often reported but rarely confirmed in the United Kingdom and a feral small cat.

As big cat sightings are one of the rare cryptozoological phenomenon that I can totally rationally throw myself behind, this is totally exciting video – it’s the sort of thing that buoys my hopes that the current search for large melanistic felids in the Pallisades of New York will net something more than tired hikers and told you sos.

 

Every Breath You Take

During my misspent youth, it was something of a running joke between my hooligan friends and I that, should any of us be unfortunate enough to be saddled with the burdens of fatherhood, that the resulting child’s life would be best turned over to social experimentation in their early years.

So ill-prepared would we be for the perils of child rearing, we knew, the only responsible choice to make would be to devote the developmental stages of our offspring to the rigors of science. In this way, our hypothetical children could make some small contribution to the world, one no doubt greater than the dissipated life of crime, substance abuse, grift and general no-goodery for which any young minds turned over to our incapable hands for parenting would doubtless be bound.

As often as we heckled one another about the strange fates of our descendants, no one really believed it. And even though we demonstrated time after time that we were, in point of fact, terrible, terrible human beings, none of us really considered that, in the regrettable event that any of us ended up breeding, we would make guinea pigs of our babies.

We didn’t know anybody, in short, like MIT researcher Deb Roy. This is a guy who sticks to his motherfucking guns. The director of MIT’s Cognitive Machines group, Roy’s research has focused on language interaction in a variety of  physical and social contexts, as well as language acquisition in children. It’s this second line of thinking that led Roy to record his child’s entire life for the past three years.

The research, known as the Human Speechome Project, saw Roy install 11 cameras and 14 microphones in his home, represents the pinnacle of embarrassing home video technology, capturing every waking moment of  his son’s young life. After three years, Roy is done recording via the legion of hidden cameras throughout his home and he and his team have moved on to the work of analyzing the resulting quarter million hours of audio and video, working with advanced software  to find the points where the babbling of infants turns into genuine human language.