laelaps | November 9, 2008
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 8, 2008I have spoken before of my fondness for book digitization projects, but there are still some improvements to be made. Many of the titles presently available via resources like Google Books are relatively low-quality and look no better than photocopies, but with the basic move towards digitization in place, there have been some movement towards enhancing the quality of rare, old books.
Archive.org, for instance, has a number of titles available as high quality pdfs I had been unable to find on Google Books. Without it I would never have been able to see Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man without…
laelaps | November 7, 2008After a few delays, The Boneyard #25 has gone up at The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Big Lie. Check it out.
The next edition is due to go up on December 2, 2008. If you're interested in hosting, speak up in the comments.
laelaps | November 7, 2008With the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States, many science-savvy folks have breathed a (tentative) sigh of relief. Perhaps we can finally put all this creationism in the classroom nonsense to rest now that a progressive Democrat is next up for the presidency. I'm not so sure, and there was a time when the loudest defense of Creation came from progressive Democrats.
The brand of young-earth creationism we are familiar with today is not so much rooted in Victorian responses to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but the fundamentalist fervor prevalent in…
laelaps | November 7, 2008
Geladas (Theropithecus gelada, females in the foreground, male in the background), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 6, 2008Maybe Toumai (or the first known skull of Sahelanthropus, if you like) doesn't represent a true human ancestor, but this documentary is still pretty interesting. Called Pre-Human: Riddle of the Toumai Skull, I missed it when it originally aired, but thankfully the glory of the inter-tubes has allowed me to see it.
The most curious thing about this particular show is that Toumai narrates its own story, and in a British accent no less! What do you think of this sort of narrative style?;
laelaps | November 5, 2008
I am actually starting to feel optimistic about meeting my self-imposed mini-deadline. It took me a few days, but I was able to go through what I had previously written for the human evolution chapter once. It let me regain my bearings and straighten things up a bit, even if I ended up adding as much as I deleted. (It now stands at 25 pages, which will have to be severely condensed.)
As far as the historical narrative, I have now reached the part when Piltdown was unveiled as a fraud and W.E. le Gros Clark convinced his colleagues that Australopithecus was relevant to human evolution after…
laelaps | November 5, 2008
From "The Larger North American Mammals," published in the November 1916 issue of National Geographic.
laelaps | November 4, 2008
First, many thanks to everyone who donated to the DonorsChoose challenge during October! Altogether, everyone who participated at ScienceBlogs raised about $30,000 for students, and I was proud to see that most of my challenges were fully funded.
The Boneyard #25 is delayed due to some technical difficulties, but it should be up sometime tomorrow. I'll announce it when it is ready, but if you have any last-minute nominations please send them to me sometime today.
The finalists for the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship were supposed to be announced yesterday, but there has been a delay.…
laelaps | November 4, 2008I didn't vote in the 2000 election. I was only 17.
I didn't vote in the 2004 election. I forgot to register.
This morning I woke up at 5:30, got myself together, and walked across the street to the polling place. There was already a line. I felt no sense of inner conflict as I shuffled through the dry and dusty corridors of the basement towards the booths. I grew up in a Republican household, a conservative by association, but since then I have seen the destruction the Bush administration's policies have wrought. For me there was only choice that was not only logical, but that I could be…
laelaps | November 3, 2008
California sea lions (Zalophus californianus, male in the foreground and females in the backgriound), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 2, 2008
After putting it off for too long, I finally began my re-write of the human evolution chapter today. I feared what I would find when I began working with it again. I had written about 25 pages, but that was back in April, May at the latest, and I knew that a lot of it would have to be thrown out.
I am not exactly starting from scratch, though. Instead of starting with a blank sheet I decided to re-mold what I had already put down, injecting new ideas and examples as I go along. Not all my prose is horrific, and to an extent I am mining what the Brian of last spring wrote for whatever useful…
laelaps | November 2, 2008I was recently asked a few questions about ScienceOnline '09 by Stephen, one of Miss Baker's biology class students. You can check out my responses here.
[Thanks to Bora for the link, too.]