Hungarian “Crocodile Hunter” dies in a rattlesnake driven motorcycle accident

New Orleans, Louisiana is a home of many weird people full with bizarre stories. One of them was Sandor Szalmas a Katrina survivor, jack-of all trades DIY Hungarian, who lived in the town since 1981. When I first heard the story of his fatal Dec. 5. motorcycle accident last week, he was in a coma with not much chance to survive. On Tuesday, he died of head and spinal injuries suffered in the accident. What makes his death really weird is the rattlesnake on his motorcycle. According to Walt Philbin of the Times Picayune (photo by George Berke):

“Police think Szalmas failed to negotiate a curve on Almonaster Avenue and struck a curb because he was distracted by a rattlesnake he was transporting on the back of the motorcycle….In the week before he died, Szalmas came upon a rattlesnake in the woods and shot it dead. When he brought it back, possibly to show his grandson, a Vietnamese woman who runs a manicure shop near his house saw it and had it cooked for him. Some of his friends speculate the reason he was taking another snake back with him at the time of the accident was that he wanted to eat this one, too.

Long before his unusual death, Szalmas was considered by those who knew him to be a larger-than-life character.

Carl Mack said his friend was “the kind of guy who would be talking with you and catching a fly out of the air at the same time or playing with geckos or eating termites he plucked off a board as he worked on a house.”

Since the fatal accident, friends recalled the time Szalmas rode his bicycle around the country, the time he chopped an alligator’s head off in a swamp when it attacked his inflatable boat, and the time he kept a rattlesnake in his living room as a pet for at least a year, using a covered-over billiards table as a makeshift cage. When he let the snake out for exercise, he would shut the living room doors and post signs saying, “Snake out,” Connelly said.

Google’s knollers and the bloggers: cooperation or competition?

Everybody is comparing Google’s Knol project to Wikipedia intended to be a “repository of knowledge from experts on various topics” (NYT) or “a free, ad-supported publishing system” (Wired), currently a “private, invitation-only knowledge sharing service” (Blogoscoped). But for a biotech blogger like me the first association is to compare Knol to the blogosphere. Just think about blogs and bloggers when reading these lines from the Official Google Blog by author Udi Manber:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

So far I could have read the message and mission of WordPress and Typepad (forget Blogger) being not just blog engines but hosts of blogs too, the only real difference is called ads and revenue:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

The question is how can Knol benefit from the quality blog content on particular topics written by expert bloggers and how can bloggers benefit from contributing to Knol? Would Google be inclined to pay for pivotal blog posts on a particular topic to use them as knols? In many cases the content – the one that Google would like to facilitate with Knol – is already there so it is natural to convert quality blog posts to knols. But why would I, blogger turn to a knoller?

Looks like the G guys are reinventing the blog wheel: