the square-cube law: “All animals jump the same height”?

It was a school-age best friend’s dad — a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator — who proposed the hypothesis “All animals jump the same height”.  Now this did not of course mean that a hippo can jump the same height as a gazelle… what it means is “It seems like the ability to do a standing leap to a given height is fairly independent of the size of an animal’s body.”  Humans and cats leap a similar upward distance, and so do grasshoppers.

So the question is, if you apply the square-cube law and the like to the issue of jumping, does scale cancel out?  Or does it only approximately do so?  Is size an advantage in jumping ability, or a disadvantage, or neither?

a very cooperative spammer

A spam I received yesterday:

Hi,
I am interested in getting up a paid blog post or a text link on http://www.paulkienitz.net
Can you please let me know your rates for a blog post or a link for the year?

My reply was this:

My price for paid advertising on paulkienitz.net is that you mail me your severed head in a box.

Here’s the reply I just got:

Deal! How soon can you get the link up?

flicker

Red-shafted Northern Flickers have been very abundant lately — I hear them everywhere.  But I almost never see them, and I could never get a picture of one.  Well, I finally did… sort of.

It’s a female.  That was as clear a view as I could get of it.