Conference waylay::askenet_v5

I altavista'd for

	+giraffe +sleep

and quickly found the answer !


(I'll leave it as an exercise for the browser)

/Eric

    
    	Eric must have upgraded his CPU recently ... the last AltaVista
    	query he ran took over three years to finish.
    

    
    	Oh, and Eric, "AltaVista" is a noun and I'd appreciate it if you'd
    	use it as such.  8^)
    

From the first page of that search's results, we learn:

"giraffes sleep for about 5 minutes at a time and total only about 20 minutes of
sleep each day."
http://loki.ur.utk.edu/ut2kids/zoo/giraffe.html -- credits Knoxville Zoo.
http://wwwcoh.modlang.arizona.edu/inst/edp512/imes/zoofacts.html (no source given)

"Giraffes sleep standing up."
http://www.sfzoo.com/html/map.zebra.html (San Francisco Zoo)

"Adults ... lie down for the first time in the evening when everything is quiet to doze
with one eye open all the time, alternating between the right and left. ... The giraffes
get up about every two hours ... With the interruptions, the
total time a giraffe lies down amounts to 7 to 9 hours per day. However, they only
attain a deep sleep for several minutes each time."
http://www.uthscsa.edu/univrel/hotline/giraffe.htm (Texas Science Hotline)

Along with fiction, jokes, and a safari ad.  Plus one dead link.  From HotBot's
first page:

"Giraffes only sleep deeply for a few minutes at a time. Sitting on the ground,
they bend their long necks down until their heads rest on their hind haunches."
http://www.agirlsworld.com/amy/wildside/gir2.html -- source not credited.

And deeper in the AltaVista results:
"Another myth is that they never lie down. In fact, they often lie down to
sleep, with head and neck lying across the flanks, although these sleeping
periods tend to be brief - one to twenty minutes."
http://www.oddy.co.za/tank/giraffe.htm -- source: Oakland Zoo

So the answer from the net is: they either stand up, lie down, or sort of
curl up in a ball, with two zoos in the Bay Area contradicting each other.
Yup, great source of definitive information.

    Anyone that treats the internet as a reliable information resource is
    making a big mistake.  An old saying applies:  the man with two watches
    never knows what time it is.
    
    If you can't find the information, then you know you don't know the
    answer.  But if you find it on the web, you never know if you have a
    correct answer, or something bogus and incomplete.
    
    I hope when teachers let their students use the web for research, that
    part of the lesson is to confirm the information from reliable sources. 
    OF course, that implies that the teachers already know that the
    internet is a questionable resource.
    
    jeb
    
    (While I'm fuming mindlessly, I really resent this idea of treating the
    internet as ubiquitous.  Certainly more people are "on-line" than ever
    before, and probably most people reading this conference are doing so
    on a device that supports internet access.  
    
    But in the first place, it seems a shame to always answer a note in the
    notesfile with the quip "use the internet".  It sounds a lot like those
    one line replies "Me too!" or "thank you" that have no information
    content and waste everyone's time. Can't we just put a note in 1.* that
    says "it is assumed that anyone asking a question in this conference
    either didn't have a more suitable resource, or actually desired to
    have the question answered HERE", and let it be done with?  
    
    At this point I'd say that a high percentage of the questions in this
    conference might be answered (though "answered" might be stretching it
    a bit) on the web.  So?  I like to think that there is a certain
    intangible quality that differentiates the Notesfiles from the web, and
    even though I can use AltaVista as well as the next person, I usually
    prefer the group discussions that ensue to the solitary surfing of the
    web.  
    
    Secondly, information on the web is, as I mentioned above, not
    officially sanctioned in any way, but moreover tends to be fleeting,
    and often incorrect, much like newsgroups.  As the previous reply has
    demonstrated, not only is the information inconsistant, but most likely
    a week or a year from now, the same search would find totally different
    information.  One of the advantages of Notesfiles is that, while the
    information may become dated, it is at least static.  
    
    This is my vote to cool it with the web references, unless a reference
    is specifically asked for.  On the other hand, if you intend to do the
    work in the first place, the least you could do is share the results of
    it while its staring you in the face, in which case a pointer, though
    it may be invalid the next time someone tries to use it, would then be
    appropriate.
    
    Hey, what a concept.  A new way to lie.  "Guess what!  Bob Palmer just
    resigned!  Really!  I saw it at http://not.the.truth.com!  Can I help
    it if that site is offline right now?")
    

    "Me too!"
    
    "Thank you!"
    
    "I agree!"
    
    
    oodles of 8-)

  A thought: maybe giraffes sleep differently if they have been raised in
captivity than if they were born in the wild, or if they are now living in
the wild. That might explain some of the discrepancies in the Web postings.
  Joke: How do giraffes sleep? I don't know, but it sure is expensive to
buy a mattress for them.

    How do giraffes swim?

    They don't need to.
    

re: .3

Actually AltaVista is a trademark and should normally be used as 
an adjective, as in AltaVista Search or AltaVista Firewall.

Not to start a trademark usage rathole.

Wes

    
    	So how can "AltaVista" be a trademark if it's not supposed to be
    	used alone?
    

    Because alone it doesn't identify anything.
    
    				STeve

    
    	A non-answer if I've ever heard one.  8^)
    

"I did an AltaVista search for giraffes, and all I got was this
lousy bunch of conflicting references." (The key is that AltaVista is
always an adjective.)

Which is a chance to mention my favorite one, which I found after the
last posting:

"Giraffes usually sleep standing up but do lie down occasionally."
http://www.sazoo-aq.org/giraffe.htm [San Antonio Zoo]

So now we have three zoos contradicting each other.  These are zoos, not
just random sites (though I found plenty of those, too), so presumably
even if you called the zoos you'd get these conflicting answers (though
you might be able to get them to qualify it, like "in the wild they don't
lie down because of predators" which another site hinted at).

re .11:

Because trademarks are (legally) supposed to be adjectives, which need a
noun to describe.

(Alpha computer, OpenVMS operating system, Big Mac hamburger etc.)

Granted, 99.9% of the general population use them as nouns, but the distinction
is important in protection of trademarks (the 0.1% are trademark lawyers and
advertizing and technical writers :-) )

"Have you driven a Ford lately?"

			Steve

Fascinating.

    .9
    
    That is not an answer to the question in .8.

One of those references said giraffes snore too !  I thought
that was interesting.

/Eric

Re: .16
> "Have you driven a Ford lately?"
Isn't that an omissive metonymy?

Looks like I was wrong about this having to be easier than explaining the 
origin of the world.  Is anyone going 
1. to a zoo,
2. on safari,
3. a zoologist wiz,
....
where they might get a qualified answer?

I guess that is one of the problems with internet: you might find an answer 
to a question, but it's hard to challenge the answer or ask for further details.
At least Notes keeps the communication full duplex.

Herta

If you're merely afraid that the web answer isn't accurately
representing the zoo, you could email or phone whomever's name
is on the web entry.