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Showing posts with label brazil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brazil. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

When animals attack: cows and snakes

A man in Brazil has died after a cow on top of his roof crashed through the ceiling of his house and crushed him in his bed.

From the story at The Telegraph...
The cow is believed to have escaped from a nearby farm and climbed onto the roof of the couple's house, which backs onto a steep hill on Wednesday night.

The corrugated roof immediately gave way and the one-and-a-half-ton animal fell eight feet onto Mr de Souza's side of the bed.

His wife, and the cow, both reportedly escaped unharmed.

Rescuers took Mr de Souza to hospital with a fractured left leg but no other obvious injuries, reporting that he was conscious and talking normally.

Hours later however he died from internal bleeding while still waiting to be seen by doctors, according to his family.

Mr de Souza's brother-in-law Carlos Correa told Brazil's Hoje em Dia newspaper: "Being crushed by a cow in your bed is the last way you expect to leave this earth.
"But in my view it wasn't the cow that killed our Joao, it was the unacceptable time he spent waiting to be examined."
His grieving mother, Maria de Souza, told Brazil's SuperCanal TV channel: "I didn't bring my son up to be killed by a falling cow."
 Meanwhile over in Israel, another man is recovering after he went to a restroom to "drain the main vein" and a snake leaped out of the toilet and bit him on his penis.

Fortunately it was small (the snake, not the... nevermind).  And it was also determined at the hospital to be non-poisonous (again, the snake).

Saturday, October 03, 2009

I've newfound respect for the Olympics

International Olympic Committee, congratulations: y'all did the way right thing in picking Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Games.

I've never been to Rio, but have heard a lot of good things about that town over the years. Maybe this'll be a good enough excuse to finally check out the place :-)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The "lost" tribe that wasn't

Just less than a month ago there was lots of excitement about a tribe of people living deep in the Brazilian jungle that had been photographed from the air. It was claimed at the time that these villagers were just now being discovered for the first time.

In the past few days it's been determined that this was a lie on the part of the photographer.

José Carlos Meirelles has admitted that authorities have known about the tribe since at least 1910! He took the photos and still claimed that these people had been completely undiscovered until his aerial reconnaissance. Why? Because he wanted it to seem like they were a truly lost tribe so that more attention would be given toward the issue of the impact of logging in the Amazon basin.

In other words: it was a lie driven by a political agenda.

I still harbor some admiration for the photos that Meirelles took, but now any appreciation for them will be forever tainted by how he chose to use them. If he had just come forward and said "hey, these are pictures of a tribe that we've known about for a long time but only now are able to get close enough to photograph them" that would have no doubt been a more respectable feat. He didn't play the part of the objective scientist at all. Instead he injected a personal bias into the matter and in the long run he probably did more harm than good to his cause.

That's a lesson that many other scientists would do well to be mindful of.

(And thanks to Nathan for passing along the news about this.)

Friday, May 30, 2008

Brazilian tribe with no outside contact is photographed by airplane

Eric Wilson sent this story over to me late last night. Look at these photos: they're of a tribe of people near the border of Brazil and Peru, that so far as we know has had no contact at all with the outside world. They are reported to have fired arrows at the airplane that flew over them as these photographs were taken...

Read more here at the BBC's website.

Kinda humbling to know that in 2008, in spite of all our technology and how we've thought that the entire Earth has been mapped, that there are still corners of it that "civilized" humanity has not been able to reach... and that there are people there.

I say, leave these folks alone. Let them be. If they ever decide for themselves that they want to go beyond their present borders, that's their choice to make.