If a group of crows is a murder, what is it called if you kill one? Come to think of it, why is a group of fish a school, a group of elephants a herd and a bunch of lions a pride? What about a group of people? Unsurprisingly, there is already a web site on this very topic. The Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center has an extensive list of animal congregation names.

On a slightly related topic, why do some animal names have an ’s’ to make it plural and some don’t? You have the no ’s’ animals, like moose, deer, buffalo, sheep, and swine. Then you have the ’s’ animals, like pigs, dogs, cats, hamsters, gorillas and lemurs. The American Heritage book of English Usage has a short discussion about plural animal names, but it doesn’t explain why.

It’s questions like these that keep me awake at night.

In order to test the performance of linux compression utilities, I compressed and decompressed a 336MB directory. Here are the results.