ConservativeINC

The elephant’s memory is legendary, but in a large, gray surprise to science, the mighty Asian elephant turns out to have a distinct flair for math as well

Under carefully controlled experimental conditions — essentially comprising a large cage and two buckets of assorted fruit — one elephant at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo managed to get its sums right 87 percent of the time.

A slightly less gifted pachyderm across the country in Kyoto scored a still respectable 69 percent.

Republican John McCain’s surprise announcement Friday of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate - some 16 hours after Democrat Barack Obama’s historic speech accepting his party’s presidential nomination -  has possibly stunted any Obama convention bump, the latest Zogby Interactive flash poll of the race shows.

Data from this poll is available here

The latest nationwide survey, begun Friday afternoon after the McCain announcement of Palin as running mate and completed mid-afternoon today, shows McCain/Palin at 47%, compared to 45% support for Obama/Biden.

In other words, the race is a dead heat.

The recently more Web-savvy John McCain campaign has re-launched its social network – McCainSpace – and it’s actually pretty good. The site is powered by KickApps, and includes standard social networking features like forums, groups, and plenty of user-generated content.

What’s impressive about the new McCainSpace is the viral potential it unleashes for the campaign. For instance, the Groups feature includes a “Hillary Supports for McCain” – which, apparently there are still plenty of according to recent polls. There are also groups for McCain supporters in every state, allowing them to organize and discuss their campaign efforts. Meanwhile, all of the videos users upload are embeddable, meaning they can be spread via blogs and social networks.