laelaps | October 24, 2008
Raspberries (Rubus idaeus), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
laelaps | October 23, 2008
I finally did it. After a number of delays due to scheduling and new discoveries (i.e. Aerosteon, Epidexipteryx) I have nearly completed the dinosaurs/birds chapter. It still requires one more edit (from a low of 25 pages it ballooned back up to 30), but it is essentially complete.
Writing the chapter was much more complicated than I expected. There are so many new discoveries (many of which require more study) that creating a synthesis of the information was difficult. Indeed, I expect some of the information I have presented to change in the near future, possibly even as the book goes from…
laelaps | October 23, 2008In the spirit of today's post about James Ussher and the date of creation, here's an all-too-true pie chart that made me laugh;
more music charts
And the worst part? While Whitney was the first to patent his particular kind of "modern" cotton gin, cotton gins had been invented previously in India. What's more, other people appear to have been working on similar improvements to the gins already being used. Whitney's cotton gin was a true new invention, but the popularity of his machine has overshadowed a more complex story. As ever, history is more complicated than I had ever been taught.
laelaps | October 23, 2008On this date, six thousand and eleven years ago (give or take a little due to the vagaries of how calendars are kept), the creation of the universe had just begun. That's according to the 1650 chronology determined by the Anglican Bishop of Armagh James Ussher, anyway, published in his Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti (Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world, which you can read here if you're well-versed in Latin).
Today it's easy to heap scorn on Ussher's dates. Scientific tests have confirmed over and over again that the earth itself…
laelaps | October 23, 2008
The skull of a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey. It is now a part of my osteological collection.
laelaps | October 22, 2008Tomorrow is certainly a very important day, although you won't get any help from your calendar. Any guesses as to what it is?
[I'll give you a hint; it's a very important date for creationists.]
laelaps | October 22, 2008
Two white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) sparring, photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
laelaps | October 21, 2008As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla the fascination of studying him begins to grow on you and you instinctively begin to speak of the gorilla as "he" in a human sense, for he is obviously as well as scientifically akin to man. - Carl Akeley
There are few places that I find as stimulating at the American Museum of Natural History, but the great halls of stuffed animals always put me in a somber mood. The organic parts of the reconstituted creatures were collected long ago, and large metal letters on the wooden frames telling the viewer who had donated the skins to the museum.…
laelaps | October 20, 2008Are you a college student? Have you been blogging during the past year? Then you definitely want to check out the 3rd annual Blogging Scholarship. The grand prize is $10,000 for tuition, books, and all the other stuff you need to continue your education. (There are two $1,000 runner-up prizes, too.)
I've already put my entry in, although I am not at all optimistic about my chances. I encourage anyone who blogs and could use some help funding their education to submit an entry, and good luck to all those who enter!
laelaps | October 20, 2008Some days I just want to scream. For years I believed what the textbooks and teachers told me about the history of science, taking in their arguments from authority, but when I started to look into the same events myself I found they were much more complex than I had previously known. I cherish the new knowledge I have gained, but it comes with a price. When someone spews out a bit of textbook cardboard, I cringe as if fingernails were being drawn across a chalkboard.
Today's tidbit was that Charles Darwin could never account for apparently maladaptive characteristics displayed by animals, i.…
laelaps | October 20, 2008
A white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
laelaps | October 19, 2008
The skulls of two juvenile, male white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
laelaps | October 18, 2008
A Huon tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus matschiei), photographed at the Bronx zoo.
And if you need an overload of cute, check out the new website ZooBorns (to which the guys from Zooillogix contribute to!)
laelaps | October 17, 2008
I had not expected it to be this difficult to edit the chapter about birds and dinosaurs. I have gone through it several times and I'm still about 11 pages over my target number, and a lot of material is going to have to be excised or collapsed. In fact, I'm afraid that as I make finishing touches this weekend the number of pages is going to balloon rather than shrink.
It would be easy to simply lay out the evidence for how we know birds are living dinosaurs, but that's been done before. This book is not going to be a regurgitation of what others have already done, and I want to introduce…
laelaps | October 17, 2008Last week I wrote about an obscure little book called Phreno-Geology by J. Stanley Grimes which, surprisingly, proposed a mechanism of evolution that combined Lamarckism with natural selection. Since I wrote it, I have been informed that this particular work is significant to the history of science, so I tried to do a little more digging to try and find reviews or reactions to the book.
As I speculated in my previous post, the good theoretical concepts Grimes came up with may have been marred with his associated with phrenology, mesmerism, and other "fads," as well as the fact that a number…
laelaps | October 16, 2008I'm going to be working on editing my book for most of the day today, but with Halloween coming up I thought I would put up an open thread about monster movies. For me, it has always been a tradition to wait until it gets dark, pop some popcorn, and put on a favorite creature feature around this time of year. Here are some of my favorites (post yours in the comments or on your blog and link back);
Alligator (1980)
My all-time favorite, and the infamous pool scene was enough to make me double-check before going into the deep end as a kid.
Prophecy (1979)
This movie tried to do something…
laelaps | October 16, 2008
A Coquerel's Sifaka (Propithecus coquereli), photographed at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | October 15, 2008... and this time he called him "Senator Government." It was the first time I've laughed during this entire debate series.
(McCain seemed be having a good time, though. He cracked himself up after he tried to get the last word in edgewise about school vouchers. I think I even heard a snort.)