No cones required in Christchurch. Maybe it’s just Auckland that’s obsessed with cones? Photo / Supplied
No cones required in Christchurch. Maybe it’s just Auckland that’s obsessed with cones? Photo / Supplied
Endangered tortoise fathers triplets at 90
Houston Zoo’s oldest resident, 90-year-old Mr Pickles, has been partnered with 53-year-old Mrs Pickles since 1996. Radiated tortoises can live for about 150 years and, generally speaking, produce few offspring, whether in the wild or captivity. Stories report that Mr Pickles has fathered triplets.The successful hatchings were made possible by a sharp-eyed zoo worker, who saw Mrs Pickles laying the eggs, which almost certainly would not have survived in Houston’s soil. The zoo transferred the eggs to the Reptile and Amphibian House for five months, to mimic their natural surroundings in Madagascar, before placing them in an incubator for hatching. The names of the progeny? Dill, Gherkin, and Jalapeno.
AI is no good at eating spaghetti
You can tell that a photographic image was generated by artificial intelligence if the number of fingers or teeth is wrong. Dan Leveille has been experimenting with AI program Midjourney.
While the people generated are more realistic than ever, he noticed it has a real problem understanding spaghetti and how people in the real world eat it. AI is getting its info from what people post online and those images are mostly of messy eating — it’s more entertaining sharing out-of-control spaghetti consumption than normal chowing down.
“My optometrist who was treating my eye infection said: ‘If it hurts you can rinse it with boiled water. Look at me. Look at me. I want you to understand that I mean water that has been boiled and has since cooled down. Not boilng water. Do you understand?’ I am so grateful for this man for ensuring I would not destroy my eyes with boiling water in them, because that is an accurate assessment of my intelligence.”
