Never one to pass up a challenge...

It's 3:44am. You know what that means? Yes, it's another barely coherant blog post from your truely. *cheers*

Alright, settle down.

A few days ago I was sitting in my A.I. lecture and Sirob Venok* (the only russian computer scientist in the world) was talking about search engines. Specifically he was talking about how it is impossible to negate things in engines such as Google. (You can't search for 'all pages without any "e"s in them; for example.)

And as an example he said 'You cannot search for all animals that use radar except for Dolphins and Bats' (actually he said 'RAD-dar' but that's beside the point). I disagree Mr. Venok, I disagree with every fibre of my being!

Let me just fire up the old Google Box...

Right, well, for starters no animals use radar (except humans of course) so I'm guessing he meant echo-location. He also mentioned Barn Owls, so we'll rule them out. Let the searching begin!

'echo location in animals' I'm feeling lucky.

Hello Wikipedia my old friend, what have you for me today?

'Echolocation works like active sonar, using sounds made by an animal. Ranging is done by measuring the time delay between the animal's own sound emission and any echoes that return from the environment. Unlike some sonar that relies on an extremely narrow beam to localize a target, animal echolocation relies on multiple receivers.'

Fascinating, but frankly not what I'm after. Good thing there's a scroll wheel built into my mouse or I'd be shafted right about now.

'Bats' Yes, we've established that.

Ah-ha! Paydirt! 'Toothed whales' Yeah mother fucker. Feeling lucky pays off first time.

'Toothed whales (suborder odontoceti), including dolphins, porpoises, river dolphins, orcas and sperm whales, use biosonar because they live in an underwater habitat that has favourable acoustic characteristics and where vision is extremely limited in range due to absorption or turbidity.'

Yeah bitch. Me - 1, Sirob Venok and his so-called PhD - 0

'Oilbirds and some species of swiftlet are known to use a crude form of biosonar (compared to the capabilities of bats and dolphins). These nocturnal birds emit calls while flying and use the calls to navigate through trees and caves where they live.'

Back of the net. 2 - 0

'Terrestrial mammals other than bats known to echolocate include two genera (Sorex and Blarina) of shrews and the tenrecs of Madagascar.[4] These include the wandering shrew (Sorex vagrans), the common or Eurasian shrew (Sorex araneus), and the short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda). The shrews emit series of ultrasonic squeaks. In contrast to bats, shrews probably use echolocation to investigate their habitat rather than to pinpoint food.'

Shrews? Fucking Shrews can echo-locate? Those furry hamster wannabes are more badass than I realised.

'See also: Human echolocation'

Now that's cool. Is anyone else imagining Ben Affleck in the Daredevil film right now? Just me?

Notice how there's no mention of Barn Owls. I think we should knock a point off for that. Final score: Me; 3 PhD; -1

The student has become the teacher methinks.

*Names changed to protect the guilty.