Food consumption and Aardvarks

This weekend was a busy weekend for random searches. The first search was the result of bringing together a group of people to drink enough to start wondering about various factual numbers. Ok, not just any people, but social science oriented folk - the worst of the lot I know. ;) The searches I performed oriented around how much food the average person in the U.S. consumes in pounds, per year, per day, etc.

The second search of the weekend was inspired by my friend's attempt to label an armadillo puppet. Instead of armadillo, he said aardvark, which I agreed with, although I had only a few hours ago called the same animal an armadillo. After a quick google image search, it appeared that the aardvark did in fact look an awful lot like the armadillo, minus a shell, which of course prompted the search what the difference is between an armadillo and an aardvark.

Search 1: Food consumption.

I found the best summary of what's out there on:
http://www.visualeconomics.com/food-consumption-in-america_2010-07-12/
*I'm a sucker for graphs

For more detailed information, the most recent food consumption information released by the usda can be found at: http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf. I tried to find more recent information since this is mostly from 2000, but I found nothing about consumption in their agency reports.


Search 2: Armadillo vs. Aardvark.


For references sake, and anyone who's curious, the puppet looks like this:


So, how can we tell the difference between aardvarks and armadillos, are they related? [the answer is no, by the way] When I first searched for, "What is the difference between an aardvark and an armadillo?" I found a wikianswers site that said this: "An advark is another term for an anteater.." And I thought, that's funny, I really don't think an aardvark is an anteater (I like to watch nature shows, including David Attenborough's amazing series - all of them ;) ).

A picture of David Attenborough because he's awesome. =)

So, what really is an aardvark, I decided to go to more reliable sources, wikipedia and national geographic - mainly because they came up in the first page of my google search on each animal. ;)

Wikipedia: aardvark VS armadillo

From wikipedia I gathered that aardvarks are actually the sole remaining species of an order of mammals called afrotheria. It is most closely related to elephant shrews, elephants, and hyraxes, NOT anteaters. They are native to South Africa.

And they had this ridiculously cute picture for our entertainment:


Armadillos on the other hand are actually related to anteaters, but are also the sole family left from the mammalian order, cingulata. They are native to the Americas. On their page there was a crazy looking picture of the pink fairy armadillo which is only 12-15 cm. in length on average:

National geographic confirmed this information and looked pretty too, as they always do.
aardvark on national geographic
armadillo on national geographic

And only armadillos, well one species anyways, can do this:

Happy searching!

The first post

A friend of mine recommended I start a blog about all the random searches I make on the internet. Here it is.

Part of my fascination/obsession with searching for random long lost items from my memory came in part from the fact that I often doubt my own childhood memories. I had/have a slightly overactive imagination and am sometimes confused about the difference between my own mental creations and real life. My plan is to write up brief explanations of what I was looking up and if there was a reason, why. And then to actually present the results of my search for anyone who might be interested in what I found. For the search, I'll first post what my search terms were in google (which I use for pretty much all of my searching needs) and then links to what I found from the search.

Enjoy!

The search

Last night I randomly remembered a show I watched on television as a child. It was a show about drawing by a man whom I remembered as donning the persona of an astronaut and who drew pictures of little alien lifeforms to teach us children about things like foreshortening and shading - the two things I remember clearest about the show. After mentioning the show to a few folks, none of whom had ever heard of it or watched it, I decided to go on a search to confirm that the show had in fact existed as I remembered it. I also realized that while I remembered the term foreshortening from the show, I wasn't completely sure what it meant. My impression was that it had something to do with perspective and the fact that things in the front of pictures are larger than the things in the back of pictures, but this didn't seem to fit with the term fore (the front) shortening (making smaller), so making things smaller in the front...? This too would have to be clarified via search.

The google search

The first search terms: alien drawing tv program for kids

Result:

- http://en.allexperts.com/q/Television-Trivia-2104/70-show-taught-drawing.htm

*From this page I got my question answered!

The find:

This was exactly what I was looking for. And the best part was that the first show I found on a video search had him talking about foreshortened circles in the first minute!! The show was "the secret city" by a guy named Mark Kistler, called commander Mark on the show.

Here's a youtube link to an episode of "the secret city" for those of you who want to see if you also might have watched this show in the 80s:

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tK70tHKhME

Here's what Mark Kistler is currently working on, he still does shows teaching kids how to draw on public television:

- http://www.drawsquad.com/index.html

- http://www.draw3d.com/TV.html

As for foreshortening, I wasn't too far off, perspective is part of it, and he definitely uses the word a lot:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)

- http://drawsketch.about.com/od/drawingglossary/g/foreshortening.htm