Mike Dunford is a graduate student in the Department of Zoology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where he studies evolution. He's also a contributer to The Pandas Thumb. As is the case with everyone else here, his opinions are his own, and do not necessarily represent those of any organization he is affiliated with.
August 31, 2007
Lucy went on display today at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and there was no way I could resist paying her a visit. I went in to the exhibit with very mixed feelings about it. A lot of...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 4:12 PM • 39 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 30, 2007
Michael Majerus has spent countless hours conducting research on the Peppered Moth (Biston betularia). He's observed them in the field, bred them in the lab, watched them get eaten by things, kept careful count of the things that he's...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:31 PM • 63 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From the archives - the following article was originally posted on my old blog back in August of 2005. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I've been reposting this series of stories over here. This is the final...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 4:38 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From the archives - the following article was originally posted on my old blog back in August of 2005. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I've been reposting this series of stories over here. There's one more after...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:53 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 29, 2007
From the archives - the following article was originally posted on my old blog back in August of 2005. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I'm going to repost this and a couple of follow-ups to the story...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:31 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From the archives - the following article was originally posted on my old blog back in August of 2005. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I'm going to repost this and a couple of follow-ups to the story...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:19 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 28, 2007
Daniel Dennett just wrote an article on chess-playing computers and Artificial Intelligence, and a few bloggers are already talking about it. I'm sort of surprised that the concept is getting so much attention. To me, the answer to the...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 2:24 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
...The complaints are really an admission that the billion dollar profits of the academic publishing industry are nothing more than a hidden government subsidy. Your tax dollars are used to conduct the research that is reported in the papers. Your tax dollars are used, in many cases, to pay for portions of the publication process. Your tax dollars are...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:33 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 24, 2007
Most of yesterday's news about Iraq focused - to the extent that today's media can be said to "focus" on anything - on our President's latest inept attempt to explain why we need to keep troops in Iraq, and...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:01 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 22, 2007
In yet another moment guaranteed to make you wonder if there's been a mass defection of writers from the Daily Show to the White House, President Bush is expected to argue later today that the war in Iraq is,...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 7:15 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2007
It's good to take the train every now and then. It lets you get a taste of something special, something that you don't find much any more. Modern air travel sucks the soul out of the journey. It takes...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 7:07 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 20, 2007
Here's a few pictures from the New York event. I might post a couple of more in the next couple of days, but most of the pictures I took are really similar to the stuff some of my other...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:42 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you read the blogs here, you probably noticed the lack of posts on Friday and Saturday, but you definitely shouldn't tale that to mean that things were quiet in the Scienceblogs world. A large group of Sciblings got...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:00 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 17, 2007
They've got a while to go before they catch up to Southwest in my personal pantheon of airline demons, but ATA seems to be getting set to give it a real good try. When we woke up - already...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:12 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Every now and then, the placement of stories on Google News can be slightly amusing. Here's two stories that turned up, one on top of the other, this morning. It's always nice to know that we're getting the important...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 6:27 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
After about five minutes, the flight attendant got back on the intercom and apologized for rushing us. It seemed that the plane wasn't actually quite ready to go just yet, because there were still a couple of empty seats up front that they needed to fill before we could leave. Two empty seats on the whole darn airplane, and wouldn't you know it, they were both in the cockpit. We finally got in to Chicago's Midway Airport at 8:09 pm. Our connecting flight had departed at 8:00. And that's where our fun with Southwest really began.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:46 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 16, 2007
Here are a couple of pictures I took of a Great Frigate Bird (Fregata minor) that was cruising around near Flat Island, just off Kailua, Oahu back in March....
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:44 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Paul has a post up with a really great political cartoon. I just printed it and stuck it on my refrigerator. You should, too....
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:58 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 15, 2007
Right now, I'm sitting under one of the outer rain bands associated with newly-formed Tropical Storm Erin. We're seeing a moderately heavy thunderstorm right now. The rain's coming down fast and heavy. There's a lot of lightning right now,...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 4:09 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Deadeye Dick Cheney, talking about why we shouldn't invade Iraq: That was back in 1994. It's sad how right - and prophetic - he was ten years before the big screw-up started....
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:39 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 12, 2007
It seems like just yesterday that AT&T was telling us that their decision to silence Pearl Jam's critique of President Bush during their webcast of the Lollapalooza concert was an "unfortunate mistake" that shouldn't have happened and wouldn't happen again. Hopefully, it won't. But based on the past behavior of AT&T, I'm not making any large bets on that.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 2:53 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 9, 2007
There are a lot of news articles out today that feature some just-published research on early human research. The research itself - a paper in the journal Nature by a team of scientists including the mother-daughter combinationon of Meave...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 2:31 PM • 46 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 8, 2007
I accidentally heard a very disturbing conversation. A young boy, probably five or six years old, was asking his mother about the moon. She proceeded to explain to him how the moon got here. It was created by God, she told him, on the fourth day.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:55 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Today, Mitt "I Like To Veto, Veto" Romney outdid himself in the "things candidates say" category of hysterical stupidity. After Mitt called for a "surge of support" for the war in Iraq at an Iowa campaign stop today, he...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 4:29 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The ones who voted for it can go back home and tell folks that they're hard on the terrorists, and are willing to make the tough sacrifices (like your freedoms) that are needed to fight it. The ones who voted against it can go home and tell folks that they tried, but the Republicans were just too tough for them. The cowards can go home and tell the left that they didn't vote for it and the right that they didn't vote against it. And the leadership can breathe a sigh of relief, because the administration can't accuse them of being obstructionists when matters of vital security.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:57 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 7, 2007
In the news today, we've got two more examples of inappropriate behavior conducted by Evangelical Christians in the military. Both of the stories are very scary, for different reasons. The first story comes courtesy of Ed Brayton. He reports...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:27 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 6, 2007
Citizens of the great state of Texas, where I now live, are very proud of their state. Proud enough, in fact, that they've got their very own state pledge of allegiance. We found out about this a few months...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:51 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
John Lilyea of "This Ain't Hell" just left a comment on yesterday's post about political speech in uniform. He brings up a couple of points that I'd like to address in some detail. First, here's Lilyea's comment in full:...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:08 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So far, there hasn't been a lot of good news for the US Military in recently published scientific papers this month. A few days ago, there was the JAMA paper that looked at the increase in child abuse and...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:04 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 5, 2007
Right wing blogs of various types are beating drums on behalf of an as-yet-unidentified US Army soldier who got into a bit of a confrontation with the moderator at a YearlyKos panel discussion. The soldier was a sergeant in...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:28 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 4, 2007
From Paul Kane's column in today's WaPo: Throughout the spring newly empowered Democrats watched their approval ratings plummet, with a liberal base upset at their inability to stop the Iraq war and independents complaining that not enough meaningful legislation...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:30 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Denyse O'Leary notes some of the differences between creationists and Intelligent Design proponents: Then the creationists in turn help the ID theorists by making clear what creationism is and what it is not. Creationism is about the BIBLE, see?...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:18 PM • 166 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 3, 2007
Only in New York could something like this happen: A man in a Revolutionary War-era submarine was cited by the U.S. Coast Guard for drifting into a security zone, and for unsafe sailing in New York's East River near...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:27 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Today's dose of accidental humor comes (like most, these days) from our Commander-In-Chief. Today, while meeting with his counterterrorism team, he said: We take a clear-eyed view of the world. The people on this team, assembled in this building...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 1, 2007
Retired army General Barry McCaffrey testified before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday: No one is actually at war except the Armed Forces, their US civilian contractors, and the CIA. There is only rhetoric and posturing from the rest...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:49 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a paper in today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association that examines the impact of combat deployments on child abuse and neglect. The authors found that the overall rate of abuse and neglect increased by more than 40% when a parent was deployed in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That result might not be very surprising, but some of the details were - and all of it is alarming.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:26 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
