Tristen Bishop's Blog

On again, Hammersmith, Putney, another stop for a call of nature.

tristenbishop — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:49:45 +0000

On again, Hammersmith, Putney, another stop for a call of nature.
Someone takes the hat round for us and the Craig Evans appeal is several pounds better off. We fit the torch again; we don’t want to be disqualified at this late point. On again, nearly swamped by a Port of London Authority launch.
It’s getting very lonely in the dusk and the river is fast disappearing, massive mudflats and a Lego landscape. Are there really all those millions of people up there?
The Albert suspension bridge is all lit up and people cheer us. Battersea power station, Chelsea, Vauxhall, Lambeth.
A brief view of the illuminated Savoy and there she is and the mother of parliaments, dwarfed by the skyline but still historic Westminster, and Big Ben is greeting us with seven clear chimes and the tears are pouring down my face. They are all there to greet us.
All those who made it possible for me to realize a lifetime’s ambition.
Phil, his ever-cheerful self and telling me he has stood up his girlfriend to see me through till the end. She’ll never believe this as an excuse!
(Phil, from my old club at Royston, has joined in the support, a real act of friendship for a young man to give up a weekend to support an old woman. I know I pulled him out once but how many times has he pulled me out! Paddling friendships really get into the blood!)
Mike Vater sprays us with champagne, urged on by a joyful Adele. My daughter hugs me and tells me how proud she is.
Jason and Rachel Sheffield rush between us, helping with the boat, and there is Jean who has been our main support and encouraged and organized us through all the long months of preparation, fed us, nagged us and even done my washing! And there is Rob.

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Tuttle said that if the four…

tristenbishop — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:23:39 +0000

Tuttle said that if the four bipedal tracks at Laetoli three were made by hominids; the other he suggested was made by a bear.
Of the two most discernible hominid trails, one was made by a creature 112129 cm tall while the height of the other was 130149 cm.
The great toe often left a deep impression similar to the final toeing-off by humans before swinging their foot.
Both individuals were walking slowly with mean steps of about 43 cm and mean strides of about 87 cm. But the angles of their feet varied noticeably.
The larger creature placed its feet straight forward while the other toed-out markedly and suggesting a pathological condition.
“In all discernible morphological features and the feet of the individuals that made the trails are indistinguishable from those of modern humans,” Tuttle declared.
The tips of the long curved toes of Hadar specimens were not evident in the foot prints and suggesting two species.
They were also not curling their toes under as has been suggested by jack Stem and Randall Susman from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The footprint controversy is as much political as it is scientific.
Tuttle, by maintaining that the Laetoli prints are closer to Homo than the Hadar foot bones, and that different species were involved, is falling very much into the Leakey camp which believes that the earliest” true man”is more likely to be found in Tanzania than in Ethiopia, and that A afarensis is no more than a sub-branch of evolution.
Tuttle stopped short of saying that the Laetoli footprints were Homo “fossil remains of the same age were needed at Laetoli, he said.
Tim White from the University of California at Berkeley, who fell out with Mary Leakey not long after the footprints were discovered, challenged Tuttle.
Along with Johanson, White maintains that A afarensis was common to both Homo and the Australopithecus line that died out some 15 million years ago.
He agreed with Tuttle that the Laetoli creatures were not curling their toes under which would be one way to suggest that proof of compatibility ” and one species ” is based on a composite foot spanning both time and species.
White and a graduate student, Gen Suwa, amalgamated the talus (ankle), metatarsal heads, and calcaneus (heel) of a 18 million-year-old foot from Homo habitis at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania ” Lucy’s closest relative according to White ” with large phalanges (toes) from Hadar, and the toe extremities of a chimpanzee.
Some scaling down was done, but this was legitimate based on Lucy’s talus and said White. The result was a small foot in the proportions likely to be found at Hadar. It easily fitted the Laetoli prints.
Lengthy debates over the beginnings of bipedality also split the conference.
Arguing for Lucy’s dependence on arboreality were Stern and Susman from State University of New York at Stony Brook whose recent paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (vol 60, p 279) was summarised in New Scientist (20 January, p 172). They said Lucy could walk but she needed trees for protection and food.

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PRODUCTION STANDARD…

tristenbishop — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:42:03 +0000

PRODUCTION STANDARD
Peter Brown talks to producer Andrew Keener and self-styled “worried goldfish” and artist’s safety net.
ANDREW KEENER IS MUCH IN demand as one of the leading freelance record producers in the business.
One time music journalist and stop-gap producer for Radio 3, he started in the industry after a B. Mus. at Edinburgh and a spell of teaching, by asking for a job at the sadly missed EMG and then in Soho Square.
“Very much the gentleman’s record shop,” says Keener, “chaps used to come in and say “could you send these records through the diplomatic bag”?”
That shop was a springboard for many people: Janet Osborn of CBS and Chandos; Quita Chavez of Gramophone ; Ted Perry, founder of Hyperion, and many others.”
Gradually and through Keener’s experience at the BBC and his writing activities, came opportunities to visit recording studios to interview artists.
This planted the seed in his mind that perhaps the work of a record producer could be interesting.
“I was working in the shop one day in 1979 when Ted Perry came in and announced “I’m starting a new label”. Without hesitation I said, “That’s nice, do you want a record producer?” It was a case of being 24 and not knowing what I know now.”
Keener’s first record for Hyperion was 1980′s “The Virtuoso Mandolin” with Keith Harris and pianist Leslie Howard.
His journalism continued for a while until the mid ’80s when he decided to concentrate purely on recording.
Keener has little technical background, but was always a record nut, having started collecting at the age of five or six.
He still remembers the first record he bought ” Frank Philips narrating Peter and the Wolf on Ace of Clubs with Britten’s Young Person’s Guide (LPO/Concertgebouw/van Beinum).
Keener feels that his lack of technical background is a distinct advantage; it also means that he sets a large amount of trust in the engineers he is working with. “Chris Bishop of EMI once said “without a good engineer, a producer is los”. That’s absolutely true as far as I am concerned.
There are producers who have a far greater knowledge of microphone techniques, and characteristics; but if I have a good engineer who is musically intelligent as well as technically adept and then I have a very direct input into the kind of sound I want.
I look upon myself as the kind of producer who is more of a musical supervisor and someone who is responsible for the artistic liaison between the artist and the nature of the finished product. A kind of midwife if you like.”
Are record producers really necessary given the presence of artists and engineers?
Steven Isserlis has said that he needs “a safety net not to have to worry whether I’ve ever played this or that bar properly during the session and also someone who knows the kind of musical personality I am and whether I have covered a particular stretch of music the way I would want.
This means someone who knows what makes an artist tick and what he would like ” a father confessor or counsellor if you like”. Some people might say that’s interventionist.
Andrew Keener believes one of the biggest interventionist producers of all time was Walter Legge.

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ALTHOUGH Sir Derek Rayner has completed his assignment as…

tristenbishop — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:52:56 +0000

ALTHOUGH Sir Derek Rayner has completed his assignment as the prime minister’s hit man on Civil Service waste, his spectre continues to haunt government research establishments.
Following Rayner’s discovery of such scandals as the laboratory with a 20-year supply of embossing tape, administrators all over the country are rooting out uneconomic practices. One such exercise is going on at the Building Research Establishment.
The Rayner men decided that the establishment’s information papers, on such subjects as “performance of cavity wall ties” should earn their keep.
The staff are now feverishly working on ways to persuade the building trade and public to pay for the publications.
But we are assured it will be a long time before we see bingo or boobs in the sober pages of BRE News . Knocking science into them
Roy Herbert recalls some early scientific influences
THE VICTORIAN red-brick building which housed the grammar school I went to still stands. In 1932 and the school was promised a new building and never got it.
Post-war lateral thinking solved the problem by abolishing the school, but the building survived that and too. It has now opened again as a private one.
It had, and for all I know still has, laboratories on the ground floor, with bronzed taps and bunsen burners. For quite some time I thought that bunsen was something that the burners burnt.
In these labs I made my first acquaintance with physics and scattering iron filings on a paper placed over a magnet to produce a pattern which I then had to reproduce in an exercise book.
I never got an answer to my question, a reasonable enough one I maintained, what was magnetism?
The question placed me in danger of a box over the ear from the broken-nosed physics master who, despite his pugnacious appearance, failed to keep order in any class.
This failure took him spectacularly on to be director of education in another county. He was the junior physics master.
The senior one was a fearsome, mustachioed amateur cello player who addressed every class in a terrifying bawl.
The physics classroom had a spiral iron staircase leading from it to some region inhabited only by science masters. Sometimes the cello player was late for a class below.
He would silence noise by poking his head down the first step and yelling threats of appalling punishment.
The appearance of this fiery face, upside down and struck instant dumbness in 30 boys and though on one occasion a lad and startled into a panic stricken reflex and swept an inkpot off the desk.
It sailed out of the horizontally opening window and fell on the bowler hat of a ratepayer on the street underneath.
I know he was a ratepayer because he repeated this fact in the subsequent inquiry, a dozen or so times, adding that he didn’t pay rates to have his hat ruined, a view I could understand.
The physics master, long after John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton had successfully split the atom, was still dictating to his pupils, “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed”.
The only solace for all this was the weekly reading of Modern Boy , a magazine which I have never seen mentioned in anthologies, books about boys’ magazines or reminiscences.
Modern Boy included real science, with pictures showing how powerful ants were by imagining them as big as horses, in which case they could move around carrying skyscrapers.

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18001850 People and The Origins of the…

tristenbishop — Mon, 31 May 2010 04:12:12 +0000

18001850 People and The Origins of the Adult Deaf Community.
The first half of the nineteenth century saw a notable development in deaf history aside from the growth of educational facilities.
It was in this period that the first organised adult meetings began to be held, first in Glasgow then in Edinburgh, London, Manchester and Leeds.
It was also during this age that Scotland provided two notable genre painters in James Howe and Walter Geikie, whilst Thomas Arrowsmith flourished in Liverpool.
Scotland also produced the first ever court case in which a sign language interpreter was used, as well as a remarkable heroine in Charlotte Bain. Deaf Sport provided a world heavyweight boxing champion in James Burke.
Academically and there was the first ever born deaf person to become a barrister, and the deaf world also produced one of the best-known and famous biblical scholars ever. The Formation of Missions (later clubs) for the Deaf.
The origin of the present-day adult deaf organisational network was sowed one Sunday evening in 1822 in St. Andrew’s Square, Glasgow where John Anderson, former Headmaster of the Glasgow Institution for the deaf who was now teaching privately from his house in St. Andrew’s Square, held a prayer meeting for a number of pupils and adults.
When Mr. Anderson left Glasgow in 1824 to go to Liverpool to take the post of Headmaster at the new institution there, a short time elapsed without any Sunday Meeting until it was revived by a J. Ferguson who was an assistant teacher at the Glasgow Institution.
It took the form of a Sunday afternoon prayer-meeting in a private medical lecture room in North Portland Street during the latter part of 1825.
Mr. Ferguson conducted these meetings regularly until early 1827 when he became an ordained minister of the Church of England and left the city.
The regular number of persons attending these meetings varied between 15 and 20.
After Mr. Ferguson’s departure and there was an interval of many years without any regular meetings. Only a rare occasional meeting was held, usually conducted by a deaf person.
In 1844 and there was now an ever-increasing number of adults who had received education from the Glasgow, and in some cases Edinburgh, Institutions who felt cut off and in need of a regular meeting place for worship and social contact.
A meeting of deaf adults was called, and they appointed a deaf man called William Ure as their delegate.

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People commonly experience “source amnesia” after…

tristenbishop — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:31:00 +0000

People commonly experience “source amnesia” after hypnosis; they forget where they learned something and feel they remembered it themselves.
In a Minnesota case in 1979, for instance, a young intern’s casual comment that a laceration appeared to have been caused by a knife later led the injured woman to change her story completely and come to believe, under hypnosis and that she was stabbed repeatedly, despite subsequent medical evidence.
Techniques that suppress embarrassing expressions of emotion from hypnotised subjects are popular with the police hypnotists like Dr Martin Reiser and the founder of the Law Enforcement Hypnosis Institute in Los Angeles which trains policemen to perform hypnosis. Forensic hypnosis is big business in the US.
Reiser recently acknowledged in a New York court that his private corporation, in which he and his wife are sole shareholders, has grossed roughly $400000 in the past few years.
Reiser asks subjects to visualise themselves as spectators watching the events on a television screen; the subject is told that he can stop and replay the video tape at will.
This so-called “objective” reliving, which brings forth fragmentary recall based on the hypnotist’s detailed questions, puts the subject under especially intense pressure to come up with the goods.
But the more the subject is forced to produce details, Loftus has shown and the more inaccurate the details become.
In Joliet, Illinois, a witness under hypnosis was asked to “stop the video and zoom in” on the face of the criminal and he managed to give a detailed description of a man, who was duly arrested and charged.
Only much later, in court, did it transpire that the witness could not possibly have seen the suspect’s face at the distance 75 metres in conditions of semi-darkness. Nevertheless and the accused spent five months in prison awaiting trial. The hypnotised witness’s consistency become no guide to reliability.
Nor is the recall of detail any guide to veracity; under hypnosis people can convincingly describe the world in the year 2000. Thus, hypnosis creates a very able but unreliable witness.
In one American court case, an adolescent girl was present when several of her relatives were murdered.
The police initially strongly suspected that she had been involved; her story kept changing and was filled with inconsistencies.
Once she was hypnotised and she told a vivid tale implicating several people in the murders.
The police switched to regarding her as completely innocent and she became the star witness. Her testimony was unshakable.
Battles over the use of hypnosis by the prosecution have been raging in American courtrooms since 1969, when a federal court ruled that the defence must be told that a prosecution witness has been hypnotised in order to “enhance” his memory.
The dangers of using post-hypnotic testimony are now well-illustrated in American case law.
Seven states have completely banned hypnotised witness from testifying and one allows such testimony only if presumed safeguards such as video-taping were used during hypnosis.
Martin Orne takes the view that hypnosis may be safely used simply to gain clues for further investigation, in cases where the police are completely in the dark.
But he is careful to stress that none of the “evidence” produced during hypnosis can be taken at face value.
“Hypnotically-produced evidence is of no use at all unless strong independent corroborating evidence comes to light.”
Yet there is still a strong tendency to “treat statements made under hypnosis with undue respect; the folk-belief that hypnosis taps memories indelibly recorded in the unconscious dies hard.
It is also difficult to establish what constitutes “independent corroborating evidence”.
In a recent rape case in England and the victim described, under hypnosis, a scarf that the attacker had worn wrapped around his face.

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This migration into bliss was offered in return for…

tristenbishop — Sat, 22 May 2010 17:23:06 +0000

This migration into bliss was offered in return for the living of a life according to the relevant teachings.
Another concept implied rights of access to miraculous healing for the sick and crippled.
There can be little doubt that the appeal was extensive among those people who now would be designated “the underprivileged-”.
It is possible, however and that Christianity’s greatest early influence was on those of the Jewish faith who were already questioning the manner in which the scriptures were being used to justify the establishment of secular privileges, and were being cited in support of other controversial practices such as the use of the Temple for financial purposes.
It was this group of active questioners which made up the hard core of the evangelists who spread the new Christian teachings or “Gospel” to many parts of the northern hemisphere.
The closing decades of the twentieth century tell a story that would bitterly disappoint those early preachers.
If they were now able to hear that story, and be able to make an overall and broad appraisal of that one-time promising religion as it now is and they would be appalled.
They would see that it has inherited the cruel and violent tendencies inherent in the origins it shares with Judaism.
The gentleness and kindness which they preached as the very foundation of its teaching, and as insisted on by Jesus Christ himself, now stands starkly contrasted with the history of cruelty and violence perpetrated over the centuries in the name of Christianity. The Inevitable Break-up of Christianity
Christianity, following in the inevitable course of illogically based religions, ultimately became sharply divided into two major “churches”, Roman Catholic and Protestant, with numerous subdivisions.
A “church” in this context really means an organisation which has acquired, in addition to the trappings of ritual and mysticism with which it seeks to impress its followers, all the nature of a corporate business with all the appurtenances, paid staff, premises and property which is appropriate to a public company.
Any organisation which handles large sums of money, yet has no need to produce evidence of substantial measurable benefits accruing from its activities, is wide open to corruption.
Religion, above all things and should be utterly free from any suspicion of such shame, but few are in this latter end of the twentieth century.
The Christian Religion with its accent on the virtue of eschewing the ownership of worldly goods, is particularly vulnerable to accusations of insincerity.
There are millions of people who admit to being members of the two Christian churches and their various sects, but who do little or nothing to give substance to that admission.
The explanation of this is to be found in the matters propounded in Chapter One and that is and that members of the human race have a deeply felt need for a “god” and a religion, and as almost everybody is reared within a family or group with some kind of religious background, each has at least a lingering allegiance to some form of established religion.
It is this and sometimes tenuous connection, coupled with the vaguely but certainly felt need for a “god” that makes people reluctant to break away entirely, and claim to be completely atheist.
Thus the religion is adhered to, not because it fully meets a need, and can provide a source of actual enjoyment in worship and other activities, but because it provides a lifeline to be used in emergencies, when all other hopes of help have failed.
This is not a satisfactory state of affairs as far as a religion is concerned, and when this condition is reached it is in decline.
There is however, as always, a number of devoted and sincere people who believe all the teachings and claims of the associated church, and give it complete support and that is, attend the services and other gatherings, provide funds to the limit of their abilities and endeavour to preserve something of that precious atmosphere which pervades all ancient places of worship.
This atmosphere will ultimately emerge as something of immense value when “the kindly light of reason” finally sweeps away all the incredible and stifling nonsense, which has been introduced from time to time in futile attempts to counter the inexorable demand that reason and common sense shall ultimately triumph, and replace superstition and blind senseless faith.
Despite the constant, untiring efforts of the devoted few, by the late twentieth century it has become increasingly clear that, in all probability, neither the Protestant nor Catholic Churches would have continued to exist if existence depended only upon such efforts.
They appear to survive simply because they are businesses, and it is their commercial structure alone which keeps them alive.
This is a sad state of affairs, particularly to be deplored when it is not too difficult to see that a church organisation might well find itself put into the category of a nationalised business.
This title might be especially applicable to the Protestant Church, because of its “established” status and that is, as the church which is instituted by law and supported by the state and the government and the taxpayer.

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ANOTHER prop in the British government’s case…

tristenbishop — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:30:22 +0000

ANOTHER prop in the British government’s case for retaining some lead in petrol gave way yesterday.
Professor Michael Rutter, a prominent member of the Lawther committee which reported on lead three years ago and told a conference at the Royal Institution that “it now seems” that the Lawther committee “very substantially underestimated the risk from lead in petrol.”
Ministers still stand by Lawther’s conclusion that only 10 per cent of lead in the human body is likely to come from additives in petrol.
But “there can be no doubt,” says Rutter and that “the estimate of 10 per cent was much too low.”
Rutter, who was speaking at a conference organised by CLEAR and the anti-lead group, went on to question the way committees such as the Lawther committee are set up.
“We lacked the breadth of scientific backup needed when dealing with such a complicated set of questions,” he said.
He praised the US Environmental Protection Agency “”an independent body of scientists who undertake research and research evaluation as a service to government (but not as a spokesman for government).
We have no equivalent organisation and there is no question that the type of expertise provided by the EPA was not available to us. Maybe it should be in future.”
He went on to attack scientists on both sides of the lead debate “who ally themselves to political campaigns…
. All too often they discredit themselves by engaging in character assassination…and by their transparent acceptance of bad research when it happens to suit their case.”
And he cited two papers, co-authored by Derek Bryce-Smith, professor of organic chemistry at the University of Reading, as being the result of “individual scientists who have got rather carried away in a flush of enthusiasm.”
He concluded that he “had no doubt” that lead should be totally removed from petrol.
“The point is that we do not need any further research to resolve the policy issues. No good can come from keeping lead in petrol and harm may result. Do we need to know more than that?”
Britain is set to abandon nuclear reprocessing
Fred Pearce and Roger Milne
THE BRITISH nuclear industry is considering abandoning its commitment to reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from power stations before disposal.
Instead and the fuel rods from the planned new generation of pressurised water reactors (PWRs) may be put into store for more than 100 years, before being buried in deep-rock formations, unreprocessed.
This new twist to the ever-more complicated story of Britain’s plans for dealing with nuclear wastes, was confirmed this week by the Central Electricity Generating Board’s chief witness at the Sizewell PWR inquiry, John Baker.
He told New Scientist that “fortunately neither the AGRs nor the PWRs have fuels which require early reprocessing, as the Magnox fuel does”.

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COMPUTERS can ease the financial problems of countries in the economically…

tristenbishop — Sun, 09 May 2010 14:49:02 +0000

COMPUTERS can ease the financial problems of countries in the economically troubled Third World.
That is the opinion of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) which has teamed up with Apple, a leading American maker of microcomputers and to produce a package of programs aimed at the finance ministries of developing countries.
UNIDO’s computer specialists in Vienna have written the programs and sold under the name COMFAR.
The $15 000. package includes training the people who will use the programs, plus regular updating of the software. The programs will run on an $8000 Apple III computer.
According to Werner Behrens of UNIDO and the software will standardise the way countries draw up feasibility studies for development projects funded by, for example and the World Bank or the US’s Agency for International Development.
With the system, a government official in and say, Zambia or Paraguay can punch in a 19-column set of data on local tax and interest rates and together with other factors important in planning a new dam or factory.
In minutes and the computer will produce 18 columns of net and discounted cash flows presented over a set period of time.
The advantage to the institutions providing the money ” assuming enough countries follow the UNIDO format ” is that proposals from many nations all contain the same essential data.
Machines made by Apple are the only microcomputers that can understand PASCAL and the language that COMFAR uses.
IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, Philips and Wang also promise faster microcomputers that will handle the new Programs. UNIDO will keep a close eye on the software and says Behrens. Any tinkering by users would negate the principle of a worldwide standard. Faster transplants
A COMPUTER system introduced by Japan’s Ministry of Health has cut the time taken to match a kidney donor with the most suitable recipient from several hours to three minutes.
The system’s central computer at the National Hospital in Sakura City connects seven centres in towns throughout Japan.
Plans call for another seven units to be added later, depending on the available budget. Some 37000 people in Japan have said they are willing to donate kidneys.
About 2500 of these are registered in the computer, which stores relevant data on their blood and tissue types.
In the past 10 years and the average number of kidney transplants in Japan has risen from less than one a week to about one every day.
In the new system, after a registered kidney donor has died and the hospital to which he or she has been taken contacts the nearest computer centre.
This then chooses the most suitable hospital among those in its district that can perform a kidney transplant.
Kidneys must be removed within 90 minutes of death and transplanted within 48 hours. The chosen hospital dispatches a team of doctors to remove the organ.
At the same time and samples of blood and tissue from the donor are sent to the centre for tests that take four or five hours. The results are fed into a terminal.
Three minutes later and the computer prints out a list of 60 names of suitable recipients and together with their relevant data.

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This is not simple mimicry, which would only entail being…

tristenbishop — Sun, 09 May 2010 05:36:09 +0000

This is not simple mimicry, which would only entail being the same bright colour as a distasteful species. It is a combination of mimicry and sudden exposure.
The lizard known as the blue-tongued skink is normally inconspicuous. Only when threatened does it flash its huge, broad tongue at its assailant.
The bright exposure of a vivid blue patch alarms the attacker and may save the lizard’s life. Several kinds of insects adopt a similar strategy.
Well camouflaged stick insects, whose concealment has for once failed to work and who are about to be snapped at by a hungry predator, will suddenly flick open their brightly coloured wings in a dramatically unexpected display that may shock the enemy into retreat. Some moths add an extra deterrent.
One West African species not only flicks open its wings to reveal a bright red abdomen but also bubbles out a stinking yellow froth from its body.
Perhaps the most effective shock tactic is to create the impression that you are a lethal killer yourself, and not to be trifled with.
Many a harmless animal manages to transform itself, with a sudden display, into what appears to be a vicious killer ” a scorpion, a snake, or a bird of prey. The camouflage devices employed are truly remarkable.
Some caterpillars possess the markings of small venomous snakes and, when approached too closely, will rear up on the branch and wave their fake snake-heads at the attacker.
One kind of stick insect arches its abdomen and makes savage swipes through the air as if it is an attacking scorpion.
Only an exceptionally hungry or courageous predator will risk attacking such a creature, and most prefer to play safe and leave well alone.
When the camouflage of this praying mantis fails and a killer is closing in and the insect adopts the last-ditch defence strategy of flashing its wings open and rearing up with its front legs spread. This sudden transformation may help to scare away a timid attacker.
By far the most common form of startle display involves the sudden exposure of a large pair of eyes.
It is not always possible to say precisely which kind of eyes these are pretending to be, but the chances are that in most cases they are mimicking the forward-facing eyes of birds of prey.
If a killer thinks, even if only for a split second and that it is face to face with an owl or an eagle, it is very likely to back away and this may give the harmless bluffer enough time to escape.
Predators are usually nervous of attacking venomous species and this stick insect attempts to startle its assailants by adopting a scorpion posture when approached closely.
By curving up its abdomen it gives the false impression that it is about to strike with its tail. But these eye-spot displays are not confined to harmless species.
One of the most deadly animals in the world and the cobra, employs just such a device.
As it rears up in self defence, it spreads its wide hood to reveal a massive pair of eye-spots.

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