Unlike most snakes, brown tree snakes are happy to eat prey they didn't kill themselves, and they are highly vulnerable to acetaminophen, which is harmless to humans.

Yes, they really said that.

Or, training live mice as commandos and parachuting them behind snake-held lines? The mice would have acetaminophen pills in case they were caught ... but in the meantime imagine what havoc they could wreak with their tiny knives and miniature pistols and itsy-bitsy blocks of TNT, while radioing back to Hagåtña every week, detailing snakish movements and strengths....

"U.S. government scientists have been perfecting the mice-drop strategy for more than a decade with support from the Department of Defense and the Department of the Interior."

Impressive. Yeah, I'll go with impressive.

Fighting rodents from the sky,
Fearless mice, who jump and die*
Mice who jump, without a qualm
The brave mice, protecting Guam!

Death to snakes, but not to men,
With a seat, a-min-o-phen!
Once we feared, the brown tree snakes,
Now we'll pop them for headaches.

*[not necessarily in that order]

Wikipedia currently thinks Operation Cat Drop might have been apocryphal (which would have made for an interesting progression from urban legend to actual program here), but a University of Iowa environmental health professor has found an RAF operations log confirming at least one cat drop took place, so this looks like the usual Wikipedian wariness of stuff that hasn't been covered by the NYT (excuse me, I meant "has a reference to a Reliable Secondary Source").

*for values of "here" that include Electrolite

Armed just with doses of
Acetaminophen,
Double-o-seven-like,
Kill with aplomb.

I'd heard that the US military has put a billion dollars into researching submersible aircraft carriers. I haven't found evidence that this is true, though it seems at least possible.

I am irresponsibly delighted by the idea of submersible aircraft carriers, which is part of why I think there might be a huge research project, even though I'm also extremely dubious that they could be kept adequately watertight while letting the aircraft out.

Anyway, the link above is about a wide range of mostly military water/aircraft combinations; real, hypothetical and fictions. I just skimmed it and am not qualified to judge the quality of the information. However, there is a lot of it and the text is only moderately ranty.

Behold the inflatoplane. Would it work better if filled with helium?

An especially pretty picture of a flying submarine, zorching along underwater. Any guesses about the artist?

Anyway, the folks who told me about the submersible aircraft carrier also mentioned airborne landing strips, which would take some of the danger out of refueling in flight.

This seems somewhat more reasonable than the aircraft carrier, admittedly a low standard. The landing strip seems like big target, but perhaps they would only be deployed as needed.

Unfortunately, this would discourage the use of zeppelins. In other words, submersible carriers and airborne strips (is there any good reason to combine them?) would be superb steampunk.

NonObSF: Steambird by Hilbert Schenck, about a nuclear-powered jet which never made it past the planning stages in the real world.

Picturing the tiny mouse corpses being dropped down from the sky, trailing bright sparkly streamers behind them, is making this no less adorable than before. (I realize that, sadly, the streamers would not be bright and sparkly. But my imagination makes it more fun.)

Two words: zombie mice.

On Day Three they'll chew through their little parachute harnesses and drop down with soft plopping sounds as they hit the understory. Those that are still ambulatory when they reach ground level will sweep through the forest in a cheeping, chittering horde, searching for ankles and toes to bite.

Does it make them move fast?

"Hail!"

The Submarine Service of the Rain Island Naval Syndicate are carefully examining the hysterical record.

I seem to remember trying to use handkerchiefs as parachutes for inanimate objects when I was a kid. I hope the cloth used in this project is no more expensive than those.

For a moment, I thought you meant someone put a brown snake in front of McCain. Oh, well.

Once I noticed that "acetaminophen" was hexapedal, I had to write a double dactyl, since oldster inspired me with his or her excellent filk.

There was a state that introduced the rat.
Drat, drat, they introduced the rat.

...nope, not working.

Henry Troup #41: Yep, that's exactly the problem (q.v. rabbits (and that horrid virus they tried on them in Australia), feral cats and dogs, probably lots of other examples I can't think of at this hour... and it frequently goes awry. Which is going to be a big part of why they're using dead mice....

It's a really good film.

I suppose in a SF future we might use robots as snake/frog/rat controls where we do not wish to poison the undesirable animals. Instead of introducing some predator. Huh. That is a rather SFnal thought. Perhaps even some sort of camouflaged little bot that guards the nest of some endangered animal.

These newborn mice are, typically, the first food taken by recently-hatched snakes of the Brown Snake type, and I'll be interested in following the results of this. I suspect that newly-hatched chickens might make better bait.

Thanks. It's a much scarier story than I remembered.

So...it's a problem of motherf***ing snakes on a motherf***ing plane, then? Has anyone consulted noted herpetologist Samuel L. Jackson?

Given what they did to Guam, if they were established here it's pretty likely they'd kill off the remaining native Hawaiian birds, who are already under terrible pressure from a number of sources. I see they're not citing that as the justification, probably because they don't want to be accused of being a bunch of hippie bird-coddling environmentalists. (Anyway, those native birds should get jobs and work harder if they want to compete in the global economy.)

Figures that a SF author would have gotten to the idea first. Oh well... I suppose we might actually be getting somewhat closer now. I heard recently of a very specialized robotic field hand for planting strawberries or something similar recently.

Though I would still dearly love a robot scarecrow that would harass the racoons in my garden.

I always think of the possums and stoats in New Zealand, probably because the native fauna are so astoundingly defenseless. (Establishing wildlife preserves at this point requires pretty careful predator-aware engineering. On the mainland you get things like the fence around the Orokonui Ecosanctuary, and on islands they've had some unpleasant surprises from stoats swimming unexpectedly long distances.)

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who actually did that calculation.

Why yes. Yes, I am. It is what fired me up for my deep thoughts.

Also, I don't think I'd ever before heard of a poison where the antidote has to be administered for months afterwards.

My point here is that the resume of the rodent-parachutist is likely to be similar: intern with somewhat unusual job doing it for bragging rights as well as a hope of being brought back the following summer for something less gloriously wacky but more useful for the future.

*flails wildly trying to come up with a What Color Is Your Parachute? joke*

*fails*

Now I'm trying to filk that with 'rat' and 'mongoose'. It's not working.

There was a state that introduced the rat.
Drat, drat, they introduced the rat.

...nope, not working.

You just have to shift things around. And then not mind the lack of rhyme so much.

There once was a State that sent mongeese in--
They thought they would win, when they sent mongeese in!

They sent mongeese in to eat the snakes,
they sent in the snakes to eat the rats,
and I don't know whey they sent in the rats--
They must be bats!

That said, I can see this coming up for an Ig Nobel...

She swallowed the pinky to kill the snake
How much drug does it take
To clobber a snake?

Wait, if she's swallowing snakes, we don't need drugged-up mice, we need old ladies!

LISA
But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

SKINNER
No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.

LISA
But aren't the snakes even worse?

SKINNER
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

LISA
But then we're stuck with gorillas!

SKINNER
No, that's the beautiful part: when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death!

With that class of blood thinners used therapeutically , once they figure out the correct dose you are told to maintain your current intake of said veg.

Did you know that that Sir Robert Clark's teddy bear is thought to have been the only one to have parachuted behind enemy lines and then survive as a prisoner of war?

The Asimov story with the robot birds is "--That Thou Art Mindful of Him". It's not in the actual book I, Robot (it was written later) but is part of the same series.

So too with the restriction of the baits to the canopy:
it's a plan to kill snakes that eat in trees, or
a plan to select for snakes that are willing to eat on the ground.

Typically, you get the survivors you select for. And that only describes the unintended consequences that are easily foreseeable!

Anecdotal via my dad:
That happened with ring-necked pheasants, imported from Asia for hunters. The original birds flew when startled.

After enough generations, a great many of them scuttled through the underbrush.

They're so good, you can't eat just one!

Tires are warm (black objects that soak up the sun's heat) and dry. Snakes occasionally coil up on top of them to stay warm. Easy explanation for how snakes end up in landing gear on airplanes.

I didn't need any caffeine to wake up the morning I found the first rattlesnake neatly coiled on a the top of my truck's driver side front tire.

The first image that came to mind was;
(Dead) Miniature Mary Poppins descending to earth using tiny paper umbrellas from sticky sweet tropical drinks.

Speaking of tropical Mary Poppins...

You ask:

Behold the inflatoplane. Would it work better if filled with helium?

A question that probably occurs to everyone who first encounters the Goodyear Inflatoplane. The answer, sadly, is no. To create any reasonable amount of lift through helium's buoyance would require a much larger volume than the Inflatoplane's.

Besides, a feature of this aircraft was that it could be airdropped in a small package. The engine was equipped not only with a propeller but also with a small compressor. The user would unpack it, spread out the rubber fuselage and wings on the ground, fire up the engine, and inflate the thing. (Though I have found one account that suggests it was sometimes inflated from bottles of compressed air, which would probably be faster.) Supposedly the compressor could supply sufficient air to keep the plane inflated even if bullet holes were to appear.

Good for rescuing downed pilots, handy to keep in a Jeep for soldiers who might need a scout plane. The military didn't buy it, and it didn't meet the structural requirements for civilian certification...

An especially pretty picture of a flying submarine, zorching along underwater. Any guesses about the artist?

Probably an in-house artist at Convair, possibly a freelance aviation artist.

Ad seen today on the BART train.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7055625.stm

Monkeys attack Delhi politician
The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.
SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys.
The city has long struggled to counter its plague of monkeys, which invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by.
The High Court ordered the city to find an answer to the problem last year.
One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques.

That's one approach, sure.

Since reading this story in 2007, I have had a Google News alert running keyed to the search terms "delhi" "ferocious langur monkeys" "out of control" "trained leopards with head-mounted laser beams". Nothing yet but it's surely just a matter of time.

They should go all in with the NRA parody:

"The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a PhD, is a good guy with a Phd."

Of course, it's just as false with "PhD" as it is with "gun", but maybe that would help to show it.

To keep the vicious tea cosies at bay?

• snakes that are resistant to acetaminophen;
• snakes that eat on the ground;
• snakes that won't eat anything they didn't kill themselves;
• snakes that can sense and avoid acetaminophen;
• snakes that won't eat neonatal mice;
• snakes that wont' eat anything with a little parachute attached to it;
• snakes drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush;
• et cetera.

To me this just raises the question: why not use two mice? Then it won't matter which end winds up where the snake can reach it (or if both do, you get two doses/two snakes for the price of one drop).

That said, I can see this coming up for an Ig Nobel...

Or even more likely, one of those congresspeople who like to superficially describe scientific research in ways that make it look ridiculous, with no attempt to understand what it is really about, in order to "make the point" that the government is wasting taxpayer money (even though the program named is an insignificant fraction of the total budget).

It's fun to make fun of the funny aspects of this program, but I hope people here are too sensible to mistake that for a substantive criticism of whether or not the program should be publicly funded or, indeed, attempted at all. (Not to say that there couldn't be cogent arguments on those points, but pointing and laughing is no substitute for one.)

Does anyone know of (link if possible) where this kind of solution worked? First, for its original purpose, and with no (or an acceptable level of) side- or aftereffects.

The efforts I'm guessing about were along the lines of:
1. determine the critters with the most powerful
pheromones
2. sterilize them
3. blanket the area

Turning the tide: the eradication of invasive species

A lot of work goes into this sort of programme, to choose the best bait/toxin combination to maximise the effect on the target species while minimising potential negative effects on other species.

I think this sounds plausible. My reference to the possibility of an Ig Nobel was because people are laughing, but then starting to consider it seriously - rather like the remote-control mini helicopter used to collect samples from whale blow-hole exhalations.

Many years ago I almost became involved in a project to study the feeding behaviour of Antarctic walruses. Obviously following the walrus around and watching what they ate was impractical (the walrus is, generally, a marine animal; also, it's very cold down there) so the plan was to sample the isotope ratios in their blubber, which is laid down in layers like tree rings. So we could say "Ah ha, this blubber layer is from six months ago and has this isotope ratio, so we know that last winter they were eating mainly shrimp; but last summer's blubber shows them eating mainly clams". Or whatever.

The implication on the ground would be ajay, in a warm coat, hiding behind boulders on a windswept Antarctic beach, shooting walruses with a crossbow. The crossbow quarrel would be tipped with a large-bore needle attached to a bit of string, allowing me to take a neat cylindrical core sample of walrus blubber, retrieve it by means of the string, and then run like hell from the enraged tonne of recently-perforated scientifically interesting blubber bearing down on me with malicious intent.

I kind of like the way my life turned out instead.

But what happened to the walrus?

The walrus is Paul.

10 successful island eradication projects

Island restoration in Mexico: ecological outcomes after systematic eradications of invasive mammals

Eradication of invasive mammals on islands inhabited by humans and domestic animals

Costing eradications of alien mammals from islands

Regarding the use of brodifacoum to eliminate rats and other rodents from islands to help sea birds. The reasons it is used despite being toxic to birds as well as mammals is because generally the rarer sea birds (as opposed to very common generalists like gulls and skuas) will not feed upon the dead rats. Secondly the brodifacoum itself is not attractive to animals it has to be added to a bait. I have read in regard to the use of these baits on South Georgia that a fair amount of research has been done starting out with smaller islands to make baits that are attractive to rats and much less so to birds.

While it will damage the sea bird populations (if present) for a time this is weighed against the gain in later years from the birds having a rat free area to nest. This has already been shown on Campbell Island among other places. Also the rarest of the rare generally do not nest at all on the targeted islands due precisely to the infestation with rats. For example the Campbell Snipe and the Campbell Teal were completely eradicated by the rats and they only survived on some smaller offshore islands and islets until after the rats were eliminated in 2001. Since then the Campbell Teal has been reintroduced and has gone from critically endangered to being just endangered with good prospects for making a full recovery.

The persistence of brodifacoum in the environment is also relatively low. It has a half-life in the soil of about 157 days and thus after three years should only be about 0.8% of the total amount put down on the island and along with being diluted should be as safe as anywhere for wildlife.

Clearly investigating this is a job for Inspector Morse. As soon as he parks his Jaguar.

English too, although it's rare now. You can still find references to "morse ivory" in auction catalogs.

I once set that up in my GURPS campaign. Not walruses, ethics. Wizards just cast spells; sorcerers summon and bind supernatural beings ("demons") to do their bidding. The ethics of this are questionable to say the least. So I had one guy trying to figure out if it could be done ethically at all.

He was compiling the Sorcerer's Code.

Both John and I have been sick this week, me with a lingering coughing cold and he with what finally got diagnosed today as pneumonia. That laughing fit was exactly what the doctor shoulda ordered. It felt really good.

So. Cheers!

Thank you. It does seem as though pykrete (an ice and wood pulp mixture which is light, strong and bulletproof) should be good for something, even if it isn't strong enough to make an aircraft carrier without reinforcement.

I'm assuming that these days, it wouldn't be necessary to build a large scale model of a aircraft carrier which is an artificial iceberg to find some of the problems.

Are there any books or websites about military projects which sounded good enough to investigate, but weren't good enough to try in practice?

You probably end up carrying a significant infantry/light-armour force to fend off enemy paratroopers.

(Yeah, I sometimes think about how this might work, in a very AH sort of way. Think big, and the RCAF almost has to be involved.)

Re: crew quarters:

How do the ice hotels and ice bars work in Scandinavia? (At least that's where they seem to come up in travel shows.)

I don't think it was saying "Merci Bien" that was the problem, it was the bit where you said you'd been gnomed for [verbatim repetition of the same phrase that got you gnomed the first time].

Gnomes:

While we're on the subject, is thanking people enthusiastically really a major marker of People We Don't Want in These Parts?

If it is, it is, but it's also something that People We Definitely Do Want in These Parts do quite often, and an important building block of community, and it worries me a bit that there's this minor but consistent discouragement from doing so.

Yes, there is video. It's included in this YouTube clip of Weird WW2 Inventions Some of them actually worked.

It was called the Great Panjandrum, and was not a success. Since the tests were hardly concealed, I wonder whether the intent was ever to use it. We controlled all the German spies, and I am sure they would have reported it.

A similar contraption was used as a plot device in an episode of Dad's Army.

The dog seen chasing the 3" cordite rockets that broke away from the panjandrum belonged to one of the engineer officers and was an Airedale named "Ammonal"

The Hajile (Elijah in reverse) rocket cargo landing system nearly worked and earned its designer a degree in engineering after the war. (One problem was that even when everything went to plan, the rocket blast formed a crater in the landing site which usually focussed the blast on part of the descending platform, flipping it over.)

DMWD produced a _lot_ of successful equipment overall, but the failures tended to be rather spectacular.

(This moose is a mine of useless information.)

I sometimes run into a similar annoyance with e-mail, whereby it seems that every standard subject line has become a spam marker and I have to do some creative thinking about how to title an e-mail in such a way that the recipient's filters won't snag it automatically.

After I initially left a comment I appear to have clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and now each time a comment is added I recieve four emails with the same comment. There has to be an easy method you are able to remove me from that service? Thank you!

This is a topic which is close to my heart... Thank you! Exactly where are your contact details though?

This blog was... how do you say it? Relevant!! Finally I have found something which helped me. Thank you!

We are continuously seeking online regarding blogposts which can help myself. Thank you!

This genuinely answered my predicament, thank you! youth nfl jerseys

I am constantly searching online for posts that can aid me. Thank you!

I am constantly searching online for posts that can aid me. Thank you!

It would therefore appear that the distinguishing characteristic is the exclamation mark directly succeeding the phrase in question.

Writing advice on exclamation marks, usage and eschewage thereof, which always seemed well-intentioned but slightly old-fashioned, would now seem extremely relevant and useful.

In other words, Don't Do It and you'll be fine.

/Thank.?.?you.?\!/i
/Thank .?you .?ever .?so .?for .?you .?blog .?post/i
/thank.?you .?for .?discussing .?this .?info/i
/Thank .?you .?for .?everything\!/i
/Thank .?you .?for .?sharing .?(this|your) .?(info|thoughts|thinking)/i
/Thank .?you .?for .?(sharing|writing)\./
/Thank .?you .?for .?sharing .?(this .?one|with .?us)/
/Thank .?you .?for .?this .?article\./i
/thank .?you .?for .?this\./i
/thank .?you .?for .?all .?the .?great .?articles/i
/Thank .?you .?for .?the .?info,/i
/thank.?.?you .?for .?putting .?up(\.|\!|\,)/i
/Thank .?you .?for .?writing this\!/i
/Thank .?you .?for .?writing .?unique .?and .?interesting .?content/
/Thank .?you .?for .?(all .?of .?the .?effort|all .?of .?your .?labor|your .?entire .?effort) .?on .?this .?(blog|site|web.?page)/i
/Thank .?you .?for .?sharing .?your .?thoughts .?online/i
/thank .?you .?for .?the .?sensible .?critique/i
/thank.?you in (spanish|german|greek|italian|english|french|danish|polish|russian)/i
/Thank.?you .?(letter|message|note).? .?(example|to)/i
/thank .?you .?letter.? .?after/i
/Thank .?you .?oh/i
/thank.?you .?sample .?letter/i
/Thank .?you .?truly .?a .?lot/i
/Thank .?you .?very .?good .?information/i
#/thank .?you .?very .?much/i
/thank .?you .?with .?this .?helpful/i
/Thank.?you .?for .?making .?this .?available\!/i
/Thankyou .?for .?this .?marvelous .?post/i
/thankyou .?for .?all .?the .?interesting .?articles/i
/Thankyou .?for .?helping .?out,/i
/thank.?you .?for .?all .?the .?great .?content/i
/thankyou .?for .?posting/i
/(thank .?you|Thanks).?, .?(i .?have|I've) .?(just|recently) .?been .?(looking|searching) .?for .?(information|info) .?(about|approximately) .?this .?(subject|topic) .?for .?(ages|a .?long .?time|a .?while)/i
/(Thanks|thank you) (a lot|a great deal|towards|very much|so significantly) (.?|for|to) (that|the|your) (report|write.?up).?\!/i
/(Thanks|Thank you) .?for .?(great|outstanding|fantastic) .?(info|data|details)/i
/(thanks|thank .?you) .?for .?(allowing|allowing for|permitting) .?me .?to .?(comment|remark)\!/i

Notes:

The .? character group will match any character or no character.

The groups in the form (X|Y) will match X or Y.

The /i switch tells the filter to ignore whether letters are capital or small.

A leading # tells the filter to ignore that line.

The \ character tells the filter that the following character is literal.

How about if we all go Southern?

Thank y'all!

["Thanks" in quotemarks. Maybe move the experiments in what the filters are over to an open thread, or perhaps to here, here, or here? -- Makusop Noris, Duty Gnome]