gregladen | 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
gregladen | July 16, 2009It 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 multiple murder to get? Is this something from a film that spilled over into real life?
source
UPDATE: This is very funny. I was just watching MSNBC and I think I figured something out. It was teh safe itself, not the contents, that the arrested bad guys were after. Maybe an antique, maybe…
gregladen | July 16, 2009What 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.
gregladen | July 16, 2009However 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
gregladen | July 16, 2009The 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 frame answers so they could be understood, all of it.
The Republicans all looked like morons.
gregladen | 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 refer had been just discovered, accidentally uncovered during a public works drainage project. I've never seen anything quite like it in all my years as an archaeologist.
It should not have been terribly surprising that there were graves in this particular patch of land, just across a small road…
gregladen | July 16, 2009Professional 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 national park near Sydney harbour.
The main suspects are dogs and foxes. At 40cm tall, the world's smallest penguin species is clearly no match for such aggressive enemies.
I am shocked. SHOCKED! That the Fairy Penguin (aka the "little penguin, Eudyptula minor) is the smallest species of penguin. I…
gregladen | July 16, 2009Dear 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 learned from sailing across the Pacific over the past 6 years, and especially from scientists focused on marine conservation, is startling. Whether you spend time on the water or not, Ocean Acidification affects all of us and is something we believe you will want to know about.
What would you do if…
gregladen | July 16, 2009Austrian 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 went extinct, but I think it was not long before Franz found the fossil.
The bones found in 1899 as well as other material have been sitting in an Austrian museum since.
~ Repost from one year ago this month ~
Excavations at the same locality in 2003 recovered much more material from this species…
gregladen | July 15, 2009According 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 problems. And, already, the Post Office is switching 1,300 of its servers to Linux.
It is only a matter of time...
gregladen | 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!!!!!!
gregladen | 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 "hallway extension" room. Let me explain.
To get into the apartment, you would walk up a set of stairs and through a lockable doorway. Then to the right was a bedroom, and to the left a bathroom. Moving on ahead were two more bedrooms on the right for a total of three. On the left side past the…
gregladen | July 15, 2009Plants 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 move from one side of your yard to the other if it is pleased to do so). Generally speaking, a plant can not avoid being consumed by the herbivores by running away. So, it must have a defensive strategy or two that work in situ, and most likely these strategies evolved in relation to the also-…
gregladen | July 15, 2009Hmmmm. 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? (Answer .... evade! evade! evade!)
Only 10% of stimulus "3.0" is out on the street so how do you really know how it will work? Now tell us how it won't work.
Snarking out on "faith based."
Tell us how it really works with Acorn... (answer: Well, not really an issue there if you look like facts but…
gregladen | July 15, 2009I 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 less. Two people who had walked out of a local store and did not see the accident came over and yelled at me.
"Leave him alone!" one of them screamed at me.
"He's an epileptic! He's just having an epileptic fit! Don't treat him like he was sick or something."
Read the rest at Quiche Moraine.
gregladen | 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 with an old fashioned TV camera (they only had the "old fashioned" ones back in those days, of course).
But, we were told, high quality color videos were taken at the same time but then lost right away. Then, we were told, they were found.
Then we were told by other people who seemed to know what…
gregladen | 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 carnivals. That is not the case with this post.
Some time ago I thought, while writing a Peer Reviewed Research post, that it would be interesting to write up older papers, classics, or more recent papers that were of great interest for one reason or another but maybe a few years old. Just around…
gregladen | 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 both, of your students are really afraid of ghosts," she said.
"Why were they even talking about ghosts?"
"They've talked about little else since finding out that the ghost tour business is the biggest thing in town! And sooner or later they're going to hear whatever that was."
"Nah, they'll just…
gregladen | July 14, 2009When 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 expressions varied in the first few days, so when we attempted to describe them to the primary care physician, he was prone to agree with our assessment but asked us to come back in if the behaviors continued....
A new post by Mike at Quiche Moraine.