Stranger Fruit
Archives for January, 2009
[Book] Davenport’s Dream
Posted by John Lynch on January 16, 2009 It is always cute when the anti-evolutionists (in all their guises) try to do history; witness here, for example. Veteran observers are not surprised to find them trying to warp history (see here, here, here & here for that). Nowhere is this warping more evident than in how DI-hacks such as John West & Richard…
Marx was a Darwinist!!!! OMG!!!!
Posted by John Lynch on January 16, 2009 David Klinghoffer is promising to deliver some revisionism over at the Discovery Institute: Starting tomorrow, I would like to devote a couple posts to the thesis that Communism has deeper Darwinian roots than many of us realize. That, in fact, even though Marx had already begun sketching the outlines of his ideas before Darwin published…
Friday Felid #3
Posted by John Lynch on January 16, 2009 Bornean bay cat, Catopuma badia Gray 1874. <source>
Cormorants
Posted by John Lynch on January 15, 2009 There are sizable numbers of Neotropical cormorants (Phalacrocorax olivaceus) that hang around the lakes near where I live here in Tempe. As I drove home this evening a flight of about ten of them were moving from one of the lakes westwards to another nearby lake. That sparked the posting of a poem. Children imitating…
Natural Selection and History
Posted by John Lynch on January 15, 2009 An interesting looking paper has just appeared online by John Beatty and Eric Cyr Desjardins that looks at the importance of history in determining form. The abstract reads: In ?Spandrels,? Gould and Lewontin criticized what they took to be an all-too-common conviction, namely, that adaptation to current environments determines organic form. They stressed instead the…
Solargraphy
Posted by John Lynch on January 15, 2009 Solargraphy is the art of using long-exposure pinhole cameras to record the path of the sun across the sky. The above example (click through for enlarged version over at APOD) is a six month exposure taken in Bristol, UK. Here are instructions to do it yourself – no processing required beyond use of a scanner…
Physioprof may be declared illegal in South Carolina
Posted by John Lynch on January 14, 2009 Physioprof may be declared illegal in South Carolina and subject to fines up to $5000 and up to five years imprisonment. Details here. And you can thank this guy.
Not so Alive, Alive O!
Posted by John Lynch on January 14, 2009 As I?ve mentioned before, I spent a good part of my graduate years working on specimens in the collections of the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Some readers may have read of the museum through the essay ?Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive O!? in Stephen Jay Gould?s Dinosaur in a Haystack. Gould was a fan of…
Eight years of craziness by the numbers
Posted by John Lynch on January 14, 2009 Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069 Portion of Baghdad residents in 2007 who had a family member or friend wounded or killed since 2003: 3/4 Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4…
Short shorts
Posted by John Lynch on January 14, 2009 Been busy here. Classes start on Tuesday so there has been a lot of administrivia to do with that. It?s also a mad scramble to get some projects finished before next week. My buddie PalMD has come out from under the feet of the Hoofnagles and has shiny new premises (?White Coat Underground?) all of…