Tuesday, November 18, 2008

I'm Looking Through Ewe

Scientists at University College Dublin have concluded that infrared photography can capture the unique pattern of blood vessels in the retina of a sheep. The upshot is that Irish farmers will now be able to indentify individual animals by looking into their eyes. The results will presumably be stored on a computer (with loads of RAM?) somewhere in the Department of Agriculture, but the practical use of this discovery totally escapes me. Will every newborn sheep have to line up for an ovine mugshot? (Baad baad Larry Lamb). As it walks into the abbatoir, will it have to pass some boffin with a laptop?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am delighted to discover on a casual search that you are still with us as there seems to have been a fallow period of some duration where your blog has been concerned.

Have you got the stamina to pronounce as tellingly on Tell Tale Signs as you did way back on Modern Times when it came out when I commented to you then in your support under the ongoing moniker of Anonymous/al-J? . . .

This one I like very much and it makes up for some preceding sins that need not have occurred on the evidence presented but I am still getting over Obama's triumph to be able to say anything other than that right now.

Incidentally, I am two thirds of the way through Middlemarch now and your vignette reminds me of something of Behan's in a collection of some of his transient journalism for The Irish Press (RIP) when he recounts going into Hodges Figgis in Dawson street and asking the assistant if she knew James Joyce's Ulysses... "I don't know the Mr, Joyce", she said, haughtily. "And if he is useless then that's his own business."

Is yours equally apocryphal?

Best

al-J

1:40 am  
Blogger Superannuated Man said...

Good to hear from you again... I have been meaning to address Tell Tale Signs, but other bits and pieces of writing keep getting in the way...
No, that Middlemarch incident is absolutely true. I was that shopper!

7:38 pm  

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