July 18, 2009
I will simply point you to my earlier post on this topic.
July 18, 2009
... continued ...
Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all…
July 18, 2009
Following almost exactly one month on earlier reports that he was gravely ill, which were followed, in turn, by denials of those reports, Walter Cronkite has died at the age of 92. And that's the way it was.
My earlier post, and one story of Cronkite's brush with Cronkite's brush with racism and…
July 18, 2009
An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis 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…
July 17, 2009
I have too many books to read in too little time but I'm making a push. And I've just added to the list one entitled The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.
Yes, yes, I know, everyone else on the planet has already read this and knows about it and since the book was…
July 17, 2009
Some time ago I announced that I was beginning on a new project. It is now time to tell you about it, and to ask for your help.
It will not be a huge surprise for you to learn that I intend to convert the blog posts known as "The Congo Memoirs" into a book. I have contracted with an agent, and I…
July 17, 2009
... continued ...
One of the main reasons we were staying in Kimberley at all was to assist the museum staff with a particular, and rather singular, survey and excavation. The location and circumstances of this field project were quite remarkable.
This was on the location of an historic hunting…
July 17, 2009
 Sabertooth Cat, Megantereon nihowanensisl There are two kinds of "true cats." Cat experts call one type feline or "modern" partly because they are the ones that did not go extinct. If you have a pet cat, it's a modern/feine cat. This also includes the lions, tigers, leopards, etc. The…
July 17, 2009
This week we celebrate the anniversary of the first time human beings walked around on the moon, and as part of that celebration we find NASA releasing improved versions of the original scratchy black and white low resolution images of the first steps taken on the moon by Neil Armstrong. I'm…
July 16, 2009
Or at least that's how I heard it, 40 years ago, when Astronaut Neil Armstrong jumped off the pad of the Lunar Modula of Apollo 11 and started kicking around moon dust.
Happy 40th Anniversary, Landing On the Moon.
(details here)
July 16, 2009
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
And, a bonus shark story:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
July 16, 2009
It turns out that the Florida couple that was murdered last week were killed as the result of a safe-cracking job gone bad. The safe was taken from the home. Seven bad guys were arrested, and found to have a very large stash of weapons.
Who has a safe full of stuff worth a home invasion and…
July 16, 2009
What I find amazing, yet not surprising, is that he danced the fire out. This is a previously unreleased video of that famous event of 25 years ago, which is said to have led indirectly to his addiction to pain killers.
July 16, 2009
However bad you thought it was, it is much much much worse than you ever imagined. Watch this:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
July 16, 2009
The part of the hearings that directly question Sotomayor is over.
I watched (substantial parts of) several supreme court justice confirmation hearings. Bork. Thomas. Souter. Roberts. Others. Sotomayor was measurable, palpably, superior to all the others in her intelligence, ability to…
July 16, 2009
.... continued ...
I wrote earlier about the graves that were dug daily to receive the dead. In truth, the details of this procedure are still being worked out by archaeologists at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, but when we were there on this particular trip, part of the grave yard to which I…
July 16, 2009
Professional snipers have been brought in to guard a vulnerable colony of penguins in Australia.
Potograph source
The deployment follows the mysterious deaths of nine of the flightless birds over the last two weeks.
The mutilated bodies of the animals, known as fairy penguins, were found in a…
July 16, 2009
Dear Reader. The following letter was written by Randy Repass and Sally-Christine Rodgers and it concerns you and the planet earth. The publication of this letter is happening in numerous blogs at the same time, coordinated by Sheril Kirshenbaum.
We are both lifelong boaters. What we have…
July 16, 2009
Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I'm not sure when this lemur…
July 15, 2009
According to a recent survey, most companies will not deploy Windows 7. They just think it is going to suck and they are not going to have anything to do with it. YouTube will not be supporting IE6 any longer. Once again, an unpatched Microsoft Expected Feature, er, I mean Bug, is causing major…
July 15, 2009
... and it's a good one ... is HERE. Go read it, click on all the links, then stubleupon or digg or whatever each of them several times!!!!!!
July 15, 2009
... continued ...
Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story.
As I had mentioned, I had the "…
July 15, 2009
Plants and their herbivores have an interesting and complex relationship. It has been true for quite some time (many tens of millions of years) that terrestrial plants do not move around while animal herbivores do (though I've got friends from Texas who claim that there is a Texan tree that will…
July 15, 2009
Hat Tip ERV
Liars lying lies!!!!!!!!!
July 15, 2009
Hmmmm. If you listen to the Fox people ... the details ... they actually do a pretty good job of making Michele Bachmann look foolish. But they are very excited to have her on the show.
Here are the FOX digs that I noticed:
Isn't your claim about "Obama counties" getting more money bogus? (…
July 15, 2009
I ran over and made myself look big so that cars coming down the street would notice us and not run us over. He was now on his side convulsing heavily and continuously. His convulsing was causing his head and neck to whip around, so I got down and held his body in place so he would damage himself…
July 15, 2009
... Maybe .... Sorta....
We've been burned by this one before. As you will recall, the claim was made that the visuals we all saw of the first steps on the moon by humans were a black and white compressed image sent from Australia, shown on a TV at Mission Control (or someplace) and then shot…
July 14, 2009
Darwin and Wallace, chillin' Let's talk about Darwin and Wallace's joint presentation on Natural Selection in 1858.
It is not usually the case that I write a blog post for a carnival. I usually just write for the blog, then now and then sit down and figure out which posts should go to with…
July 14, 2009
... continued ...
So there we were in the Haunted Guest Quarters of the Old Infirmary, and I had already heard the ghost once. In the morning, my colleague and BFF Lynne who was staying with us for a couple of days noted that she had heard the mysterious footsteps as well....
"Greg, one, maybe…
July 14, 2009
When Ella was three years old, she began exhibiting strange behaviors and for several days we had no clue as to their meaning. She was having difficulty with her toilet training, and we guessed that the stress was manifesting itself in what we shortly learned were partial-complex seizures. The…
