It’s funny how the news cycle works. Every now and then an old news item will suddenly resurface and do the rounds of all the news outlets, and then when you check into it it turns out that there is no new “news”, just a rereporting of a story from years ago.

This recently happened with the “Face of Jesus” generated by Richard Neave’s team in 2001. It was a fairly big news item at the time, but in 2015, the major news sites began doing articles on the topic as though it were news, even though (near as I can tell) it is still exactly the same face that they produced in 2001 and there have been no developments whatsoever.

And today I am seeing stories about the Quagga project which has been rattling on for years now, and I’ll be darned if it looks as though there have been any new developments, but someone somewhere decided that “Quagga, Zebra cousin, recreated 100 years after extinction” was the news today.

The Quagga project has been trying to breed Zebras to be more quaggish, basically, and their beats have incrementally been getting more quaglike for thirty years now.

dv said:

It’s funny how the news cycle works. Every now and then an old news item will suddenly resurface and do the rounds of all the news outlets, and then when you check into it it turns out that there is no new “news”, just a rereporting of a story from years ago.

This recently happened with the “Face of Jesus” generated by Richard Neave’s team in 2001. It was a fairly big news item at the time, but in 2015, the major news sites began doing articles on the topic as though it were news, even though (near as I can tell) it is still exactly the same face that they produced in 2001 and there have been no developments whatsoever.

And today I am seeing stories about the Quagga project which has been rattling on for years now, and I’ll be darned if it looks as though there have been any new developments, but someone somewhere decided that “Quagga, Zebra cousin, recreated 100 years after extinction” was the news today.

The Quagga project has been trying to breed Zebras to be more quaggish, basically, and their beats have incrementally been getting more quaglike for thirty years now.

They’ll eventually turn into a finch.

That’s not what a zebra finch is, PWM.

i think that typo “beats” should have been beasts not beaks, pwm, so probably no finch.

> The Quagga project has been trying to breed Zebras to be more quaggish, basically, and their beats have incrementally been getting more quaglike for thirty years now.

Surprisingly to me I’ve never heard of it. I’ve heard of the wooly mammoth project (was watching a great TV program about recent developments last night). And the Tasmanian tiger project, but not the quagga project.

i’m surprised we haven’t had the government pumping billions of dollars into a project to breed a woolly mammoth with a hummingbird

just imagine the economic benefits we’d get with that

wookiemeister said:

i’m surprised we haven’t had the government pumping billions of dollars into a project to breed a woolly mammoth with a hummingbird

just imagine the economic benefits we’d get with that

They could use the flying mammoths to spray water on fires.

dv said:

wookiemeister said:

i’m surprised we haven’t had the government pumping billions of dollars into a project to breed a woolly mammoth with a hummingbird

just imagine the economic benefits we’d get with that

They could use the flying mammoths to spray water on fires.

well we’d need a special breed of mammoth and hummingbird of course

would push the R and D to 100 billion but its only money right?

dv said:

wookiemeister said:

i’m surprised we haven’t had the government pumping billions of dollars into a project to breed a woolly mammoth with a hummingbird

just imagine the economic benefits we’d get with that

They could use the flying mammoths to spray water on fires.

Gold.

Loved reading about the quagga. I’d seen old pictures of what I thought were zebras harnessed into carts, but had read that zebras weren’t very tameable for human uses. So now I know that they were quaggas. And that colonisation and the mindset that went with it wiped them out.