Word of the day
In Making Light, TNH pointed the other day to "Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows," which includes a cool video clip of a crow creating a tool by bending wire. Nifty stuff—I think I saw a pointer to this last year but I think I didn't watch the video at the time.
Anyway, in one of the comments to that post, someone referred to "bird forebrain structures like the wulst." Wulst. Wulst. It sounds like an alien race from a Jack Vance book. A quick Google led me to an item titled "Ascent of Madame Grunnebaum's Wulst"—a remarkably evocative title if "wulst" is a part of the brain, but this seemed to be a rock-climbing site. But then I saw that several other hits on the term were in German, so I used Babelfish to determine that "wulst" means "bulge" in German. So presumably the initial consonant is a /v/ sound.
But it's still a funny word. Say it with me: wulst.
