gregladen | July 20, 2009I will be hosting Berry Go Round # 18, for July 31st 2009.
Please send me your submissions. Try to use the word "berry" or something in the subject line so I can find them! Berry Go Round is a blog carnival devoted to highlight recent posts from the blogosphere about any aspect of plant life.
gregladen | July 20, 2009... up and running at A DC Birding Blog. Please go and click all over the thing. Thank you very much.
gregladen | July 20, 2009Seriously, I'm not kidding.
Rebecca Skloot has ended up with a puppy (off the street) that is going to die unless it receives expensive medical treatment. Go here to find out the details and donate a buck or two via paypal.
gregladen | July 20, 2009Did you ever notice how some verbal expressions have an extra meaning for you, just you, because of history? In reflecting on this, it is impossible to not consider such lofty topics as memes, cultural transmission, and ... well, meaning. A particular expression might invoke a memory of an event, or of a person who often uses that expression. That can be a pleasant experience, or an unpleasant one. If you know what I mean.
A moment or two ago a person who could only be described as annoying, whom I do not personally know, corrected me on Facebook. I had responded to Carl Zimmer's lament…
gregladen | July 20, 2009
The McGregor Museum is a complex building with several wings surrounding an inner court yard, a multi-layered roof, balconies everywhere, and numerous trees in the court yard close in to the building. So, a cat can spend the heat of the day in the shaded crown of a tree, and the cool of the evening up on the building's sun-warmed metal roof.
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The interior of the McGregor museum houses numerious exhibits. The old period rooms and hallways focus on the late 19th century, and other newer areas (not shown) have an excellent set of exhibits on archaeology, human evolution, and "San" rock…
gregladen | July 20, 2009Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon?
Any time you've got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you've gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the kind of organisms, big rivers, high mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and so on can provide a habitat or a barrier, and when there is a barrier, populations may end up splitting across that barrier and diverging to become novel species.
The role of the big tropical rivers such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the role of rain…
gregladen | July 19, 2009As promised, the footnotes for A True Ghost Story.
1Unless this statement itself is not true, in which case, how can you know what is true and what is not true? And besides, it can't really all be true because some of it is about ghosts.
2Who wants to be alone sitting in the dark?
3I use the term "non-White" along side the terms "Black" and "White" to signal that there is complexity here. There are three sources of complexity. One is linguistic, one is ethnic, and one is historical. First, the "ethnic" or "racial" issue: to the extent that these concepts are valid at all, which is very…
gregladen | July 19, 2009... continued
Finally, without any further interruption ...
One morning I was up a bit earlier than usual, and I was in the bathroom shaving. It was an hour or so before sunup. The lighting in the bathroom was poor, but there was a security spotlight outside the window, as I recall, so I had opened the frosted glass pane to let in a little more light, as well as the clean, cold but dry night air, which would keep the fogged over bathroom mirror clear.
As I was just starting to scrape the razor against my face in the bathroom, I heard the ghostly footsteps walking one way down the hall…
gregladen | July 19, 2009... Well, that is not really what the former Democratic opponent of Wackaloon Bachmann said, but he might as well have. As is being reported generally and nicely summarized on DMB, Tinklenberg, who will be running for Michele "The Congresswoman" Bachmann's seat, has publicly announced that he will seek election even if he is not endorsed by the DFL.
"Huh?" you say? Well, if you are not from Minnesota you may not know about our stupid-ass system for selecting Democratic candidates. Well, most Minnesotans don't understand it either, but we do know this: If you are a Democrat and you run…
gregladen | July 19, 2009 A gingerbread computer can be complicated.
When you, Joe or Mary user, buy a computer at Best Buy or Computer Village or order a computer from Dell or Gateway, you get a computer with a system already installed. Do you think they had any trouble installing that system on that computer? Do you think that if Dell sells Mary a computer with Windows installed and they sell Joe a computer with Linux installed, that Dell had a differentially hard time installing one of those systems compared to the other?
Think about it.
~ Repost from one year ago this month ~
Linux and Windows each have…
gregladen | 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 knowledge resides, and you will not find it there.
There are things, it turns out, that The Great Knowing Web Site does not know. My source is a combination of primary and secondary documents, written histories, and a documentary that is not generally available.
Barney Barneto nee Barnet Isaacs was a…
gregladen | July 18, 2009Following 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 a strong Latina woman, is here.
gregladen | 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 this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the activities of an ancient very pre-human hominid, is one of the oldest well dated, in situ objects of its kind known.
The stone had some yeck on it, and for giggles, this stone got passed on to a physicist who had invented a new way of…
gregladen | July 17, 2009I 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 published a very very long time ago (late 2008?) it does not deserve to be discussed in the blogosphere.
But it is relevant as news because of the connection between various nefarious players who have done recent stupid stuff and the organization outlined in the book.
I'm especially looking…
gregladen | July 17, 2009Some 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 am currently writing a proposal for the book.
Over the last couple of months, I've also been working on the problem of the book's overall structure, and considering what else it will contain besides the 28 existing Congo Memoirs. Oh, and I should mention right away: This is not a memoir. The very…
gregladen | 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 reserve, where every one of the buildings where guests were quartered and entertained was built well before World War II. Even the ancient charcoal refrigerator was intact and in use. This was a large cylindrical structure with double mesh walls. When the game was afoot and dozens of buck were…
gregladen | 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 other kind are called "sabercats" because this group includes the saber tooth. It is generally believed but not at all certain that these two groups of cats are different phylogenetic lineages (but that is an oversimplification).
It has been suggested for some time that the bite force mechanics for…
gregladen | July 17, 2009This 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 worried that the youngsters out there do not understand the momentous nature of this event. So stand still for a minute while I force some wisdom on you.
Back in those days I was hanging around a lot with Bob Miller, a classmate who wanted to grow up and be an oceanographer. Bob had a pool in his…
gregladen | July 16, 2009Or 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)