laelaps | June 30, 2008I'm not much one for beauty tips or fashion gossip. Give me a t-shirt with something geeky on it and a pair of jeans and I'm happy, but delving into the depths of fashion history can have its rewards. At least that's what my cousin-in-law Bonnie Downing found and she amassed a collection of strange tips for a book called Peculiar Beauty.
Bonnie has carried on the same theme in a new blog by the same name, and the most recent entry about some strange suds. With the price of gasoline these days I don't think it's going to be en vogue as a hair treatment anytime soon...
laelaps | June 30, 2008Of the few courses of value I have enrolled in while at Rutgers, one of my most favorite was the paleontology class taught by William Gallagher from the NJ State Museum (which, coincidentally, has just re-opened!). Much of the course dealt with invertebrates, the lectures being more oriented towards geologists than paleontologists, but there were still a few juicy lectures towards the end that involved vertebrate diversity and evolution. During these lectures he briefly mentioned the Permian temnospondyl Eryops, and he noted that it was probably an aquatic ambush predator, or "crocodiling…
laelaps | June 30, 2008A few months ago I was enjoying a pleasant evening with a few friends when the topic of evolution came up, more specifically the work of Stephen Jay Gould. One of the people in the room asked "Who's he?" and before I could respond someone else did, commenting "Well, he showed that Darwin was wrong." I can't lie, I'm surprised I didn't exclaim "WHAT?!" (although I did think as much). I quickly jumped in and explained how this was not so, explaining in words what Gould illustrated with a coral branch in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. While Gould is famous for his arguments with "ultra-…
laelaps | June 30, 2008
An Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed in the summer of 2007 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | June 29, 2008Over at the Other 95% Kevin Z picks up where I left off on high school science education, publishing science books, and the barriers that he and I both face in our quest to become science writers (among other things). Most interesting, though, is his response to a somewhat off-the-cuff remark I made about making cheaper (if not free) science books available to the public. As someone who is working on a book and would like to write plenty more, there has to be a way for science writers to make a living. (If I could I would drop whatever else I was doing at the moment and focus on writing, but…
laelaps | June 29, 2008
To put it mildly, this summer's crop of films has been a disappointment. Out of the handful of films I've seen I leave most going "Eh, it was alright," picking over the story I just saw to find something that made the $10 ticket price worthwhile. Not so with Wall-E. Even though there is almost no dialogue at all in the film ("Wall-e," "Eve," and "Directive" are the most commonly used words) it is one of the best pieces of cinema I think I have ever seen. I laughed more than at any recent comedy and at certain points I almost teared up; as I am concerned Wall-E is the best movie I've seen…
laelaps | June 29, 2008
The picked-over remains of a horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), the tracks around it being a dead giveaway as to who enjoyed a breakfast of rotting chelicerate. Photographed on May 17, 2008 at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | June 28, 2008
When I think of many of the robots that appear in Hollywood films and occasionally pop up in segments on news magazines I can't help but notice how many of them look like people. There seems to be some expectation that when we all have personal helper droids they'll look more like us than R2-D2, but I have to wonder if our body plans provide a good design for robots that might eventually be made to do a number of tasks. (Our upright bipedalism, for example, means that every time we take a step we have to prevent ourselves from falling over. Such a mode of locomotion is difficult to…
laelaps | June 28, 2008The other night I finally picked up Adrian Desmond & James Moore's Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist and I have found it to be one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read (even though I am only about 130 pages in). I would have proceeded much further already but I started reading it aloud to my wife and she has been enjoying it so much that I have been barred from proceeding further unless I continue to orate the contents of the biography. It's a hefty book, my voice may well give out by time I get to the end, but it is certainly worth a few summer afternoons if you have…
laelaps | June 28, 2008
A laughing gull (Larus atricilla). Photographed on May 17, 2008 at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | June 27, 2008I've got my second precalc exam tonight so I'll be hitting the books, but I won't leave you hanging. Here are some pictures of the numerous kittens that have come through the apartment during the past week;
This is June; she was adopted last Saturday.
These are the little bottle-feeders that stayed overnight.
This is Eliza, one of the kittens that is now staying at the apartment.
This is Madeline, Eliza's sister.
They are experts at not looking at the camera.
A close-up of Charlotte. Eyez of teh tyger; I has them.
[Update]: Speaking of cats, check out Nature on PBS this…
laelaps | June 27, 2008
A female lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed at the Bronx zoo in 2007.
According to Reuters the Spanish Congress is set to extend legal rights to apes in captivity, ending cruel experiments, isolation in circuses, and other forms of mistreatment. (Zoos will still be allowed to keep apes but the conditions there must be improved.) Although not yet passed, the legislation has enough support that victory is close. The folks behind the Great Ape Project have been pivotal in pushing this initiative and I sincerely hope that other countries in which apes are still subject to cruelty…
laelaps | June 27, 2008
The remains of a horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) that didn't make it back into the surf. Photographed on May 17, 2008 at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | June 26, 2008Through the magic of the intertubes, Blake has a dump-truck full of reflection on the current state of science blogging and what science blogs can't do. The question at the center of the post is "Can someone get a fair science education from reading science blogs?" and Blake says no, citing the general lack of interest in laying out the basic concepts of science. Unless you're personally motivated to contribute there isn't much incentive to write such introductory material; many of us write because we enjoy it and there just isn't an incentive to try and come up with a textbook chapter.…
laelaps | June 26, 2008If you like bad b-movies featuring clunky cgi dinosaurs it has been a good summer so far. First there was gratuitous silliness of Aztec Rex;
Close on it's tail, though, is 100 Million B.C. (not to be confused with the recent big-screen cheese fest 10,000 B.C. or the classic One Million Years B.C.). The film looks like someone dropped a couple of seasons of Stargate, a copy of The Lost World, a few issues of The War That Time Forgot, and Michael Gross in a blender and hit "Gooify";
laelaps | June 26, 2008
This is Chase, the first cat I adopted about two years ago. He actually belonged to some friends of mine, but when they got a poodle Chase was so stressed out that he would do little more than hide in the laundry room. Being that he warmed up to me while still at his old home I agreed to take him in, and he's been getting white hairs all over everything ever since.
laelaps | June 25, 2008For those of you who love sauropods, you'll definitely want to check out the latest issue of Paleobiology. I don't have enough time right now to give each a full treatment, but here's a brief summary of each;
"Modeling growth rates for sauropod dinosaurs" (Thomas M. Lehman and Holly N. Woodward) -
Sauropods were the largest of dinosaurs (and among the largest animals to have ever lived), but how quickly they attained their huge sizes has been hotly debated. Determining how quickly sauropods attained adult size has major implications for considerations of dinosaur metabolism and body…
laelaps | June 25, 2008I still have to upload the last photos I took of her onto the computer, but last Saturday June was adopted. I had a feeling she would be; lots of people had been asking about her, even one who wondering if June could be shipped for free...
After June was adopted my wife and I watched a trio of tiny bottle-feeders overnight. They wanted to make sure they got every last drop of milk, and when that was gone they decided to suck on my hand for a while. They went back to their regular foster home the next day, but last night Tracey and I picked up two new foster kittens. I named one Eliza and…
laelaps | June 25, 2008
I'm not much of a fan of the Walking With... series/Dinosaur Planet/When Dinosaurs Roamed America documentary format. (And don't get me started on the Chased by... and Prehistoric Park stuff.) The visuals are ok and it's hard to say no to reconstructions of some of my favorite prehistoric creatures, but most of the time I just end up being bored. I want to know about the science and hear what paleontologists have to say, not see a "Just so story," and I'm sorry to say that the IMAX film Sea Monsters falls into the same, dull storytelling mode.
The film starts out with a group of "…
laelaps | June 25, 2008
Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), photographed in New York on June 14 2008.