I just installed a new banner from Carl Buell up top. Sort of 2001 meets parasitoid wasps. It's making the rest of the blog act funny for reasons I cannot divine, so the tech gods have been appealed to.
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Parasitoid wasps (or rather, one group of them called the Ichneumonidae) are the subject of one of Charles Darwin's most famous quotations: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding…
Few humans have been as successful in Hollywood as parasitoids. Parasitoids are a particularly gruesome kind of parasite that invariably kills its host by the time it becomes an adult and is ready to leave the host's body. A parasitoid female wasp, to give one example, will fly along until it finds…
The emotions that other species summon up in the human brain are perplexing. A lion inspires awe and respect. It is the king of the jungle, a great name for a football team, a noble guardian of the entrance to the New York Public Library. A tapeworm, on the other hand, summons disgust mixed with a…
Perhaps you might have noticed my brand spanking new banner up there! It was just recently finished by my friend Carl Buell, blogger at Olduvai George and a phenomenal natural history illustrator. I love it, and hope you do too. At the moment, its slightly oversized so I'm gonna have to figure out…
Carl, pagan gods, including the tech gods, require sacrifices...
Worth it, though. That's pretty cool.
The hominid looks to be a peeping Tom, the first creature back of it is smirking, no? The second is saying " Oh, hell! Here we go again!"
The double helices and the floating, hovering parisitoids???
And...anchored to the left an erupting Volcano and over in the other corner, the Cosmos to complete it all.
Could be a poster for a Flintstones' school room???
Er, um, Mr Zimmer? I can't see the banner on Firefox.
I'm using FF, the latest. It shows up, no problems. Must be an add on that's blocking it, perhaps?
It seems to be only showing up on the main page, not the individual post pages. But it's definitely cool!
The poster shows your main writing areas - parasites and evolution, and it is very well drawn.
However, could we have a few other modern lifeforms on the right-hand side of the poser, please?
Otherwise your poster could be taken to be a sequence from left to right over time. Starting at the left:
no life 4-5 billion years ago, the development of DNA, the development of insects, a sort of shrewish mammalian ancestor, a monkey/ape ancestor, an hominid ancestor, then the stars (implying human space travel now and in the future). Read that way, it could be mis-understood to be impying that mankind is the pinnacle and purpose of creation (or a form of intelligently directed evolution) and other lifeforms are incidental.
Ok--banner should be up now on all pages. Thanks for catching that omission. As for Ross's comments, there's only so much catering to potential misimpressions that can go on in a banner. When I look at it, I see a set of related species, one of which now has an unprecedented relationship to the rest of the universe. Like this.
Uhm, now that you've posted the explanation I can see the point for it. yet, although I love the single drawings, the whole thing kind of seem missing something...