Cranky Little Bastards

[xchrom]

http://www.slate.com/id/2299263/

The man who walked a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center said he was calm and unafraid 1,638 feet above the ground, without a net.

What is Philippe Petit afraid of?

"Things with too many legs, and not enough legs." (As he told NPR's Peter Sagel.)

M. Petit was probably thinking first of spiders and snakes, but it's centipedes that go to extremes in the leg department. Eight works for spiders, two seems fine to us, so centipedes, with between 20 and 300 legs, seem to be overreaching. But their limb version came first. They're the Earth's oldest terrestrial animals, zipping around on all-hundreds for the past 450 million years.

Centipedes went the multilegged route for speed in catching prey. The showy statistic is for the house centipede—Scutigera coleoptrata—timed running at 42 centimeters per second. With a body size of just 2 centimeters, this little creature is the cheetah of arthropods. Unlike their relatively benign myriapod cousins, the millipedes, they're meat-eaters.

[AlecBGreen]

1. somewhat off-topic

but Man On Wire, a movie about Philippe, is a great movie. IIRC its on netflix streaming.



p.s. centipedes are fine. Snakes are hideous. Many legs = good, no legs = bad

[hty7645]

2. cool stuff