Paul Z. Meyers
Is there anything geekier than blogging from the prom? Come on out to St Paul for the party—Mary and I are the pair in lab coats, and yes, that is just a squid in my pocket.
pharyngula
Posts by this author
Hey! Coturnix is horning in on my turf, with a link to fornicating devil beetles (these are not popular beasties in my neighborhood—we get swarms of them every summer, crawling through every crevice to invade our house.)
It's cool to see, but I may have to send a few of the boys over to the quail-…
The kooks at Answers in Genesis never disappoint—they always come through with their own daffy interpretations of things. It didn't take them long to scrape up a few excuses for Najash rionegrina, the newly discovered fossil snake with legs.
They have a couple of incoherent and in some cases…
John Wilkins has an excellent linky post on the subject of race. My position on the issue is Richard Lewontin's (seen here in a RealAudio lecture by Richard Lewontin), and more succinctly stated by Wilkins:
So, do I think there are races in biology as well as culture? No. Nothing I have seen…
I hear it's National Poetry Month, but poetry is way out of my skill set. I was sent this interesting poem about Darwin today, though, so that will be my contribution.
If you want poetry with themes similar to what I write about, I suggest you read Phawrongula. It's still being updated with new…
It's a busy busy day today.
It's Earth Day. I'm going to spend a little time this morning with a community group helping clean up part of the town.
It's a new student registration day at my university—this afternoon, I advise and help next year's freshman figure out what courses to take.
Tonight…
At least someone found my idea of reinventing humanity inspiring: Nemo Ramjet rendered this version of of my hexapodal sapient.
It's different than I would have pictured it—the way I juggled about the functionality of the head, I think the face would not have been at all recognizable as human—but…
It's been a long, long day of committee meetings and classes and various other time-sucks. Time to unwind with a Friday Random Ten.
Raspberry Beret
Prince
Make Your Move
The Delgados
Wayward Bob
Bonobo
A Town Called Luckey
Rilo Kiley
Horses
Patti Smith
Crazy Man Michael
Fairport…
a–c, The wing spots on male flies of the Drosophila genus. Drosophila tristis (a) and D. elegans (b) have wing spots that have arisen during convergent evolution. Drosophila gunungcola (c) instead evolved from a spotted ancestor. d, Males wave their wings to display the spots during elaborate…
Sepioloidea lineolata
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Salman Rushdie was in Minneapolis last night—I wish I could have been there, but that 3 hour drive can't be taken lightly—and it sounds like he was in excellent form:
When asked the question, "Who gets to tell our stories, and who decides who gets to tell them?" Rushdie replied, "Well, you're…
In the discussion about the Minnesota GOP platform, this comment from Molly made me think about what it would be like if Republicans were consistent in their attitudes towards sex and guns.
If Republicans taught gun safety like they do sex education, they would:
allow everyone to own a gun (even…
Thinking of graduate school? Here's some good advice about mentorship.
A few carnival announcements:
Carnival of the Animalcules
Carnival of Feminists
Carnival of Education
The next Tangled Bank will be held next Wednesday at The Inoculated Mind (yes, it's back up!). Send your submissions to karl AT inoculatedmind DOT com with "Tangled Bank Submission" in the…
We had some rain overnight, and this morning the sidewalk on my way to work was swarming with earthworms and slugs. The slugs here in Minnesota are tiny little pathetic things, unlike the lovely behemoths I grew up with in Washington state, but they're still cool to see. Anyway, Afarensis led me to…
Oh, sure. They say it's just a way to play videogames with your pet hamster or mouse, but I think it's an exercise in training rodents in how to hunt down and kill us. The only thing saving us now is that they don't know what to do with a health-pac or ammo or a BFG9000 when they find it on the…
A helpful reader has improved his killfile script—now you don't need to edit it at all, and it puts a little "kill" link in each comment so you can easily take out annoying commenters with a click. Again, this requires Firefox with the Greasemonkey plugin, so you IE users and us Safari people are…
The true history of the world is told in the movies, so obviously what we need is a compilation of movie events to see what was really going on. It's a work in progress, so there are a few gaps—the period between 1 zillion BC and 65,000,000 BC is a bit sparse on information—but more recent events…
My pedipalps were slavering at the news of a symposium on spider sex to be held on the Catalan coast of Spain. Ah, if only I had a legitimate excuse (other than prurience) and a budget that could handle the expense…
Here's what seems to be a relatively simple problem in evolution. Within the Drosophila genus (and in diverse insects in general), species have evolved patterned spots on their wings, which seem to be important in species-specific courtship. Gompel et al. have been exploring in depth one…
You really must take a look at the Republican Party of Minnesota Permanent Platform. It's full of interesting goodies.
There are 19 items in the section on civil rights: ten of them are various permutations of "NO ABORTION!"; two are against gun control; one is to protect people from being forced…
I'm hoping McClellan will be replaced by Tony Snow.
How can we resist? Every press conference will be a Snow job.
He's had so much training for this position. It's like he's a professional liar.
You know how much I love to see creationists in prominent Republican positions.
Fox News, White House…
My daughter has posted her ACT scores (if you don't know what they are, they're an exam high school kids take; here's an explanation of the scores). She did very well, especially considering that she took them a year earlier than most kids do. She's a sophomore in high school, and she wants to go…
We biologists think we're all grody and cool with our dead mice, but then some smart-aleck chemist has to go trump us all with thermite explosions. That just isn't fair.
Just wait. Now some physicist is going to come along and make us all envious with his homebuilt laser.
Hold it! I just had a…
It's a busy time for transitional fossil news—first they find a fishapod, and now we've got a Cretaceous snake with legs and a pelvis. One's in the process of gaining legs, the other is in the early stages of losing them.
Najash rionegrina was discovered in a terrestrial fossil deposit in Argentina…
Spot is quoting Kevin Phillips and his new book, American Theocracy(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). He's describing the stagnation of scientific progress in the West when religion set its heavy hand on learning.
Symptom number two [referring to attributes regimes that become increasingly theocratic],…
Forbes magazine asks
What if you could pick one thing and start over from scratch? What would you change? Would you choose another career, a different home, a new spouse? Or would you choose to remake the world around you? Why not fix America's prison system, make schools more efficient, or make…
He's still being dodgy about whether he's going to run against our plastic stepford senator, Norm Coleman, in 2008…but the Al Franken interview in the City Pages is worth a read. Another thing he doesn't do is plug his Midwest Values PAC, which is a really interesting idea. It's a kind of bloggy…
Susie Madrak talks about killing mice—read it for the denouement. I'll share my first experience with killing mice, but I'll keep it below the fold for the squeamish.
I'd grown up familiar with mouse and rat traps, but it was my father who was in charge of setting them and taking out the little…