Pertaining to this post: George Bush Makes me Laugh The phrase “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” is an old southern (Southeastern, I think) expression once used by Bill Clinton. It was also used by BB King in one of his songs, and BB King was in fact on…

… So, if you drive the boat downstream past the hippos they watch you go by, the big male feints attack a few times, you get past them, and everybody gets over it. Up ahead, the next pod of hippos has observed this, and they are waiting for your arrival…. Read the rest.

See? It really exists.

Linnaeus’ Legacy, the Blog Carnival, will be hosted here at the end of the first week of January. A monthly carnival celebrating the diversity of life on this planet, and the methods we use to understand it. I’m sure you have something for me. Send me your posts!

Everything Worth Reading, Dec 28th issue, is HERE at EWR Central. The one yearth Berry Go Round, A Year Round the Berry-Go-Round, is at Foothills Fancies. Grand Rounds 5.15: At the interface of evolution and medicine is HERE at moneduloides. Philosophers’ Carnival 84 is here. The 46th Carnival of Mathematics – the last one of…

Obamadog. Barack Obama’s first serious mistake since the election. A true story starring Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Without distinctions and boundaries, the race concept cannot apply to a given species. Species with observable geographical differences in one or more traits may be better described as having clinal variation. Without correlation among traits, the race concept has none of its usual utility, whereby we place individuals into categories and then predict invisible traits…

… is here. Every year since nearly the beginning of the Blogosphere (since last year, at least) Joh Swift has produced a special compilation of the best of the year among a wide range of bloggers. These are self selected blogs and each comes with a little writeup and in some cases an LOL cat.…

The Bush Anti-Patriot Act and its paper minions across the states is nothing less than the undoing of the fundamentals of American freedom. Ironically, this has been done with the collusion of the poorly educated Libertarian and Rightist supporters of the conservative movement, who really, honestly, are primarily concerned with clinging to their guns and…

…I notice the door man take a quick glance up the street and subtly drop his smoke out of sight next to the stairs. He steps half way onto the sidewalk. Sure enough, Baronelli himself is coming down Hanover, walking his dog … a tiny frenetic brown thing … leash in one hand and an…

Why was this post so popular? Scantily clad athletes? Hair raising death denying stunts? Incredible writing and a fascinating story? People googling the Olympics a lot? We’ll never know.

I’m not mentioning any names, and don’t ask me any details. In fact, don’t repeat this story. Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the…

To me, the key moment in CrackerGate was the posting by PZ Myers of the key, essential truth of it all: The same church law that mandated the sacredness of the Eucharist also mandated that Jews would always wear a mark indicating their Jewishness. The latter eventually lead to the holocaust, as you know. That…

Many of my posts related to the Webster Cook Affair received a great deal of attention. In fact, the blogospheric activities related to the PZ Myers CrackerGate showed up as a noticeable bump in the internet and blew out a couple of those Middle Easter cables that are always breaking. This post is selected from…

We went out to cross country ski this morning. Never got to ski because it got to warm and rainy, so we went instead downtown and eventually to the Walker to appreciate some modern art. People do not go to the Walker museum of modern art in Minneapolis to appreciate the art as much as…

This post arose as a convoluted experiment in internet perception, curious motivations, and blogging ethics. Almost none of the objectives of this post were met, but it does include three photographs of sexy naked ladies, so you probably do not want to go there. Don’t. Click. Here.

Children from low-income families in the US and Britian are disadvantaged in school, according to research just now coming out from the University’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation. From a press release:

This is one of those cases where our language gets the logic of biology backwards (or otherwise wrong) and at the same time potentially causes inappropriate human responses. Also, this approach to “morning sickness” is dripping with adaptationism. Which is good. Got a problem with that? Have a look.