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TGIF: Holidays

No overdue paper on deep water formation in the western North Atlantic for last semester's PhysO class is gonna stop us from having a little fun on Thanksgiving day. In about one week there should be a Christmas tree behind us. That's Maria and Ana on the right. Clara and me on the left. Clara turned two a week ago. Happy holidays from the family. Here in Texas we eat tamales from Christmas. Like on Mars. They do the same thing there... Man, I hope it snows. Good luck with final exams, everybody.

What is "sea foam" made out of?

Reporter Gives Update Covered In Sea Foam: MyFoxNY.com Given the location, New Jersey/New York metropolitan area, this part of the wikipedia definition may be most pertinent: Where polluted stormwater from rivers or drains discharges to the coast, sea foam formed on adjacent beaches can be polluted with viruses and other contaminants, and may have an unpleasant odour. If crude oil discharged from tankers at sea, or motor oil, sewage and detergents from polluted stormwater are present, the resulting sea foam is even more persistent, and can have a chocolate mousse texture.* Hat Tip Joe

Atomic cold cream

Somehow I don't think any cosmetics company today could get away with doing an experiment like this to prove how well its cold cream cleans the most dirt and makeup residue from a model's skin. I'd also really love a copy of the "Atomic Test Booklet" that people could mail the company to request. You'd never guess from the title that it's about makeup. Also, I have to wonder. Some 50 or 60 years later: Is the model in this commercial still alive? How many skin cancers did she have removed from her face? Inquiring minds wnat to know!

The White House 2010 Federal Taxpayer Receipt - Where Does The Money Go?

To mark "Tax Day," April 18: The White House website has just launched a "Federal Taxpayer Receipt" calculator that shows you where those federal tax dollars go. As an example, I used amounts from the 2009 tax return submitted by President Obama that reported payment of $1,792,414 in federal taxes from a gross income of $5,505,409. {Give it a try, entering the amounts from your 2010 return!} The results: As you see, more than 50% of these dollars are allocated to national defense and health care. Will this ever change?

Adaptive Hybridization

Not all beneficial alleles come with deleterious side effects, in case I gave that impression. Of course, not all beneficial alleles come from mutations either. Hybridization between closely related species can lead to advantageous alleles introgressing into a population from another species. Loren Rieseberg, who has been studying hybridization between sunflower species for some time, has an article in the upcoming issue of the American Naturalist (press release here) on the introgression of an advantageous allele from one species to another. This is probably quite common and may have…

Craig Venter, Sequenced

Lookie here -- they've sequenced Craig Venter's genome. What did they learn about Craig? Well, he's European. He has 46 chromosomes. He's got some structural differences from the reference genome. Venter also differs from the reference genome by insertions and deletions.Like every other human, he's got a boat load of repetitive sequences in his genome. And he differs from that reference genome in coding sequences. Levy et al. 2007. The diploid genome sequence of an individual human. PLoS Biol 5: e254 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050254

What Porcelain, O This Porcelain?

Chinese police recovered 21 pieces of porcelain from a fishing boat and another 117 pieces from others. When asked where the porcelain came from, the owner claimed that divers recovered the relics "by accident". Apparently, they just fell into their wetsuits. Happens to me all the time. In actuality an illegal salvage operation was being conducted. Chinese archaeologists discovered the wreck, now referred to as South China Sea II, laden with Ming Dynasty porcelain in 20m of water. The ship is over 400 years old and probably struck a reef.

A blast from the past

When I was growing up, dinosaurs were almost always on television for one reason or another. From movies to commercials, from cartoons to documentaries, there was always some ancient creature on the screen. Among the panoply of prehistoric programming the documentaries featuring Eric Boardman and Gary Owens were among the ones I remember most fondly, and I just happened to stumble across a few of the old shows on YouTube. Here's one from a series the two hosted, "More Dinosaurs," that was one of my favorites (although the ending gave me nightmares);

Ash eruption video from Halemaumau

On Sunday afternoon, a large ash eruption occurred at Halemaumau Caldera at Kilauea. Not only did the volcano belch more grey ash than usual, but also red-hot incandescent material can be clearly seen being thrown from the vent during the vigorous eruption. The coolest thing about the eruption is that it was all caught on film by the USGS/HVO. Take a look (at three times speed) - this video is from the morning of October 12, but there are a series of video from the whole weekend on the website.

Comments of the Week #159: From seeing Mercury to the stars going dark

“It all had a beginning in the original cosmic explosion, whatever that was, and it'll all have an end when all the stars run down.” -Isaac Asimov, The Last Question Each week brings new challenges, new questions, new topics and new things to think about here at Starts With A Bang! For those of you looking for something awesome to do later this month, come to Seattle, Washington's May 24th event: Astronomy On Tap, at Peddler Brewing Company, where I'll be speaking! Beyond that, I just received my first look at the layout of the inside of my upcoming book, Treknology, and it's going to be…

Lydians & Etruscans

In response to the Etruscan story comments like this keep popping up: The articles in the press keep mentioning the Etruscans coming from Lydia. Lydian was an indo-european language. So, although there may be a linguistic link to Lemnos and a genetic link to Western Asia, there is no obvious link to Lydia and the classical accounts of the origins of the Etruscans. On my other blog I placed "Lydia" in quotation marks because saying that the Etruscans were Lydian is about as accurate as saying that the Wyandot (Huron) tribes who resided north of lake Superior in 1500 were "Canadian." To the…

Insulin, sugar, and evolution

In my last post, I wrote about insulin and interesting features of the insulin structure.  Some of the things I learned were really surprising.  For example, I was surprised to learn how similar pig and human insulin are.  I hadn't considered this before, but this made me wonder about the human insulin we used to give to one of our cats.  How do cat and human insulin compare? It turns out, that all vertebrates produce insulin, even frogs and zebra fish.  Human preproinsulin is only 110 amino acids long and even human and fish insulin are pretty similar.  Of course, this observation only leads…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Too Mellow For Our Predatory World: Flight Behaviour Of Marine Iguanas: Marine iguanas on the Galápagos Islands live without predators - at least this was the case up until 150 years ago. Since then they have been confronted with cats and dogs on some islands of the Archipelago. For scientists, they are therefore a suitable model of study in order to discover if such generally tame animals are capable of adapting their behaviour and endocrine stress response to novel predation threats. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, the University of Ulm Tufts University and…

Veterans' Sacrifices

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., and the Department of Veterans Affairs reminds us of the purpose: Veterans Day is the day set aside to thank and honor ALL those who served honorably in the military - in wartime or peacetime.  In fact, Veterans Day is largely intended to thank LIVING veterans for their service, to acknowledge that their contributions to our national security are appreciated, and to underscore the fact that all those who served - not only those who died - have sacrificed and done their duty. There are plenty of speeches, parades, and other events marking this holiday. The…

Tuberculosis as a zoonotic disease

Tuberculosis in humans is most commonly caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a slow-growing, waxy, rod-shaped bacterium. Transmitted primarily via the air when an infected individual coughs or sneezes, it's estimated that a third of the world is infected with this agent, which causes approximately 2 million deaths every year. Though most infections are asymptomatic, infection is becoming increasingly deadly, due both to the spread of highly antibiotic-resistant strains and due to the increasing number of individuals with both HIV and TB. While M. tuberculosis is primarily a human…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Cage Matching: Head to Head Competition Experiments of an Invasive Plant Species from Different Regions as a Means to Test for Differentiation: Many hypotheses are prevalent in the literature predicting why some…

Fossil Feathers Reveal Their Secret Colors

tags: researchblogging.org, melanosomes, plumage color, feather color, fossil preservation, birds, dinosaur, Jakob Vinther Male Red-bellied woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus. Image: Ken Thomas (Wikipedia) [larger view]. When looking at paintings and reconstructions of fossil birds and dinosaurs, people often ask "how do you know what color they were?" Well, we didn't. However, a new paper was just published in Biology Letters that explores the possibility of deciphering the actual color of fossilized plumage and makes a startling discovery: scientists can identify at least some of the…

Is coalition bombing behind a 17-fold increase in birth defects in an Iraqi city?

In just eight years, the incidence of congenital birth defects in Iraq's Al Basrah Maternity Hospital increased 17-fold, a new study reports. An earlier study found the incidence of birth defects at that hospital to be 1.37 per 1,000 live births between October 1994 and 1995 (out of more than 10,000 births total); in 2003, the rate had jumped to 23 per 1,000 live births. The authors also report that, in an analysis of hair samples from 44 Fallujah children with birth defects -- the most common being congenital heart, neural tube, and facial clefting defects -- and 10 Fallujah children without…

Galaxies near the speed of light!

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." -Albert Einstein Now that you know how many galaxies are in our expanding Universe, you might be wondering about their speeds. After all, since the Universe is expanding, that means that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it's speeding away from us. Graph credit: Michael Rowan-Robinson. What's more than that, since the expansion itself is accelerating, galaxies speed away from us ever faster as time progresses. It should come as no surprise, then, that galaxies that we see moving away from us at high…

The significance of the new East Asian fossil human Penghu 1

A new early human fossil has been reported, recovered from the seabed near Taiwan. We are calling it Penghu 1. Simply put, it is the lower right jaw of a hominid (hominine) that most resembles either a form of Homo erectus or Archaic Homo sapiens (kin to, but not, Neanderthal). Teeth are fairly useful for categorizing hominids into groups that can be thought of as species. This hominid does not look like modern humans (teeth are way too big and the enamel is not right). It does not look like African Homo ergaster or Asian Homo erectus. It does not look like Neanderthal or so called…

Why Do Polarized Sunglasses Work?

In the previous post about light polarization, I promised to post an explanation of why it is that "Polarized" is a selling point for sunglasses. Given that sunlight is unpolarized, the only obvious benefit would be that polarized sunglasses will automatically block half of the light hitting them, but it's actually much better than that. To understand why they work, though, we need to talk about how it is that light waves are produced and propagate in a medium. Sticking with the classical picture of light as an electromagnetic wave, you can understand the production of electromagnetic waves…

I'm meltinnnnng ....

Some commenters seem puzzled by my conclusion that a couple of recent studies of melting north polar ice could mean an ice-free Arctic within 13 years. I will agree that it does seem rather extreme, but the data support such a conclusion, as a responsible estimate of the near-term end of range of time values. Perhaps part of the problem can be traced to a rather poorly designed graph, drawn from data in a paper (subscription only) published Tuesday in Geophysical Research Letters. Allow me to explain: The paper, by Julienne Stroeve, Marika M. Holland, Walt Meier, Ted Scambos, and Mark Serreze…

Bacteria on your keyboard point to your identity but forensic value is unlikely

We all know that as we type on our keyboards or click our mice, we leave behind fingerprints that could be used to deduce our identities. But these prints aren't the only remnants of our presence. Bacteria from our skins also linger on the things we touch and they could act as a sort of living fingerprint. The thriving community of bacteria and other microscopic passengers on our skin has many traits of interest to a forensic scientist. For a start, they are remarkably personal in their membership and stable over time. Just 13% of the bacteria on my palm also live on yours, and even…

Notes from Honduras II

In 1999, during my intern year, Hurricane Mitch struck Central America. As stated below, I wanted to become involved. The program director of my residency was kind enough to view this as a worthwhile educational experience. This is part II of my diary from the trip. Part I is here. To Juticalpa As we left Teguz, we crossed one more bridge and began to climb into the hills that surround the high valley in which rests the city. Thin dogs wandered along the roadside sniffing at the animal skulls lining the road. Women and children crowded into ravines to wash clothes in the river which was both…

More on the California Creationist Lawsuit

From the archives - the following article was originally posted on my old blog back in August of 2005. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I'm going to repost this and a couple of follow-ups to the story over here. In a post earlier today, I noted that a group of creationists are suing the University of California system in order to force UC to accept several of their classes that are currently not considered adequate. One of the courses in question is biology. As I already pointed out, UC is not discriminating against Christians by refusing to accept the class; it is simply living…

Anonymity vs. Pseudonymity

This comment by Lassi Hippeläinen deserves notice: Sorry if I sound pedantic - I worked many years as a system architect in computer secutiry - but this argument will not go anywhere, unless its basic terminology is clear. More specifically, there are two concepts that are getting mixed up all the time: anonymity and pseudonymity. Pseudonyms are stable, used by the same person(s) all the time. They have Internet credibility, even if the real name is not publicly known. Therefore even pseudonymous writers tend to behave civilly. "Anonymous" bloggers are in fact pseudonymous. Anonyms are…

Doing the right thing, doing the legal thing

Megan McArdle has a post up where she follows up on her disgust with home owners who "walk away" from their mortgage obligations when they can continue to pay them. In California, and many other states, the bank can't come after you if you walk away, so if your home is "underwater" then it is often a "rational" decision. Megan makes the point that our economic and social system does not rely purely on rational self-interest, but also on an accumulated capital of norms which lead to virtuous cycles. My family is from Bangladesh, and I have seen this first hand. Corruption & nepotism in…

Britain's lost lynxes and wildcats

You might have noticed very little/no activity here over the past two weeks: partly this is because I'm very busy (preparing for Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective, among other things), but it's also because I currently have no internet access at home. Sigh. In an effort to add something new, here's the long-planned, third and final part in the series on Europe's cat fauna, adapted from the Big Cats in Britain talk 'The deep time history of Britain's felid fauna'. In a previous article we looked at homotheres, lions and leopards, and in a second one at jaguars, pumas and cheetahs. This…

Comments of the Week #71: From the Universe's age to the science of the CMB

"The specific moral is that within the standard model the [cosmic microwave background] temperature is a key parameter in fixing the thermal and dynamical history of the Universe. The measurement of this parameter made physical cosmology much more definite, and the detection of the radiation made the Big Bang cosmology a good deal more credible." -P.J.E. Peebles The Universe is never going to run out of wonders for us to discover and explore at a deep level, from fundamental truths to how the Universe assembles all its structures. Here at Starts With A Bang, we covered just a slice of it:…

The "Million-Dollar Pig's-Tooth Mystery"

The "Hesperopithecus" tooth discovered by Harold Cook. I could see it coming from a mile away. As soon as I heard all the hype surrounding "Ida", the exceptionally preserved specimen of Darwinius announced last week, I knew creationists would soon be citing our old friends "Archeoraptor", "Piltdown Man", and "Nebraska Man" as reasons not to trust evolutionary scientists. Each was a public embarrassment to scientists, that is true, but there is no reason to sweep these mistakes under the rug. Each can tell us something valuable about the way science works and how scientists interact with…

Organic Farming and Antibiotic Resistance

A recent article in Applied and Environmental Microbiology illustrates the effect that conventional farming, which uses a lot of antibiotics, has on the evolution of antibiotic resistance. The authors examined the difference in the frequency of resistance to antibiotics in the human pathogen Campylobacter. Resistance in bacteria from conventional raised poultry (actually, the carcasses) was much higher than in organic, non-antibiotic intensive farming: for floroquinolones, which are commonly used in medicine (e.g., ciprofloxacin), less than two percent of isolates were resistant, compared…

Technology Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large version of the Technology channel photo, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Control panel of a Soviet B-39 submarine in San Diego, California. From Flickr, by Jeff Kubina Reader comment of the week: In Memo to Windows Vista, Chad of Uncertain Principles vents his frustration with Microsoft's newest operating system. After Chad changed a setting, to prevent his computer from automatically restarting every time it required "critical" updates, he found it had mysteriously been reset. Chad leveled a threat: If this arbitrary re-setting of settings…

Perennial Perils of the Solar System

On February 15th, Asteroid 2012 DA14 came hurtling between us and our satellites, twelve times nearer than the Moon, so close that it was visible through binoculars from certain parts of the globe. Greg Laden writes, "This asteroid is not going to hit the earth now or during any of the next few decades, but eventually it may well do so." On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel writes that the Sun's 11-year Solar Cycle peaks in 2013, meaning we can look forward to a year filled with solar flares. Even when these are spewed towards Earth, our magnetic field protects us from irradiation. But solar…

Puffy ankles? You may get sleep deprived.

Fluid Displacement From Legs To Neck Can Lead To Obstructive Sleep Apnea: When a person lies down, a small amount of fluid displaced from the legs to the base of the neck can narrow soft tissue around the throat and increase airflow resistance in the pharynx by more than 100 percent, predisposing the person to obstructive sleep apnea. ---------------------- In obstructive sleep apnea, a blockage in the throat or upper airway causes victims to repeatedly stop breathing long enough to decrease the amount of oxygen in the blood and increase the carbon dioxide. -------------------------- "Our…

Bolden Responds

"Text of Bolden Response to Wolf Letter Re Chinese Participation in Kepler Conference" - from spacepolicyonline.com >From: Bolden, Charles (HQ-AA000) >Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 12:20 PM Central Standard Time >To: >Cc: >Subject: Response to Chairman Wolf "It is unfortunate that potential Chinese participants were refused attendance at the upcoming Kepler Conference at the Ames Research Park. Mid-level managers at Ames, in performing the due diligence they believed appropriate following a period of significant concern and scrutiny from Congress about our foreign access to…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here is my pick for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Mutation and Evolutionary Rates in Adelie Penguins from the Antarctic: Molecular evolutionary theory suggests that for neutral DNA sequences, rates of mutation and evolution should be equal. However, there has been considerable variation in empirical estimates of…

flu like illness on Canadian train

Passenger train halted and quarantined in northern Ontario One dead, apparently 60 year old female. Ten sick, four reported serious. All reportedly part of a tour group from Alberta, train Vancouver->Toronto. All from two sleeper carriages. 'flu like symptoms. Reports don't specify if that includes a fever. Could be toxin - food or bad ventilation. Or it could be infectious agent. PS: with a food toxin or inhaled toxin fever is unlikely. Presence of fever would suggest bacterial or viral infection. Bacterial infection could be from food, though it is more likely to be gastric than…

If you thought Ray Comfort was vacuous…

… try Denyse O'Leary sometime. She's now written a list of predictions from ID, and I don't think she understands the meaning of the word "prediction" in a scientific context. Eight of the nine are variants on the theme, "there will be no natural explanations for X," which, try as we might, reveals that our demands for positive, productive explanations from the ID crowd go unheard, and they'd rather just whine that they don't understand something, so we must not, either. The one exception: she doesn't believe the eco-doomsayers who predict that we will destroy all life on the planet. She…

Weekend Diversion: The world’s first Vine from space (Synopsis)

“I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word—joy.” -Yuri Gagarin Most weekends, you can come here and count on me to provide you with a diversion from the science, space and astrophysics we normally talk about during the week. But this weekend, I've got something far too spectacular about the Universe to keep to myself. So have a listen to a classic from The Byrds from…

The Sun is Exploding!

Well, it is always exploding. But I just heard that "A big coronal hole is turning directly towards the Earth. Solar wind flowing from the opening should reach our planet on June 5-7, possibly sparking geomagnetic storms" and maybe the aurora will be visible over a larger area. I heard that from the iPad app "3D Sun." This is an app that informs me whenever the sun is up to anything interesting, and also provides images of current and older solar events, a handy glossary of terms, and an excellent 3D sun "globe" (as it were) which can be used to find landmarks and stuff: Pinch-able…

The New Zoo Borns Is Out!

Just in time for Christmas. The problem with cute baby animals born in the zoo is that they grow up. The upside of this process is that you need a NEW Zoo Born every so often, and the new one is out. ZooBorns The Next Generation: Newer, Cuter, More Exotic Animals from the World's Zoos and Aquariums is ... f"The new generation of zoo babies will reset the standard for devastating cuteness. From the creators of the smash hit ZooBorns series of books, ZooBorns The Next Generation features full-color photos and fascinating facts on exotic baby animals from every corner of the world. Filled with…

Another Funny Brooch

Here's a funny little guy from our site in Kaga. It's a crumpled-up disc-brooch, about 75% complete, original diameter 71 mm, copper-alloy pin extant and folded into the brooch, pin-catch extant on back, apparently soldered on. On the surface of the brooch are a central large boss with mock-filigree, surrounded by five identical ones, and outside those five are another five smaller bosses. All in all eleven bosses. The surface of the brooch is divided into petal-like fields by lines of tiny bumps. All decoration is visible on the back side too: most of the piece is just 0.6 mm thick. I…

First Interplanetary Travellers Will Be Little Swedes

Phobos-Grunt ("soil") is a planned Russian sample return mission to the Martian moon Phobos. It may launch in less than two months. On board will among other things be the L.I.F.E. experiment, a small canister full of hardy micro organisms, designed by the US Planetary Society. If all goes well, those microdaddies will go to Phobos and back, and then biologists will be able to compare them to their stay-at-home buddies to learn what the environment out there in interplanetary space really does to an Earth creature. Or to a creature from another planet who might once have been thrown into…

Why is Earth blue? (Synopsis)

“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding — yet beautiful — Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.” -Buzz Aldrin If you look at Earth from space, you'll find that we're a blue planet. You might chalk that up to the fact that our sky is blue, the sky is the outermost layer of our planet, and hence the planet appears blue. But then why do the continents and clouds appear to be such different colors, and why is the "blue" of the ocean such a…

Weekend Diversion: The Horror And Beauty of California’s Wildfires (Synopsis)

“the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart” -Charles Bukowski When it comes to destructive forces that are also mesmerizing and impossible to look away from, it's hard to compete with fire. Have a listen to Josh Ritter sing about one of the most common, destructive types, Wildfires, but consider that there's often a beauty to the destruction that's rarely captures. Image credit: Stuart Palley, from his instagram feed at https://instagram.com/stuartpalley/. Photographer…

Dark Matter: Giver of Life (Synopsis)

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” -Joseph Campbell When you think about dark matter, you probably think of a few things: how mass and gravity don't appear to line up, how there isn't enough normal matter to account for the motions we see on scales of galaxies and up, and how it's necessary to form the structure we see on the largest scales, from the early times of the cosmic microwave background to the cosmic web spanning billions of light years we see today. Image credit: Tony Hallas, via http://www.qsimaging.com/gallery.html. But what you might not realize is that…

Dark Matter May Be Completely Invisible, Concludes World's Most Sensitive Search (Synopsis)

"For me the best answer is not in words but in measurements." -Elena Aprile If you want to find dark matter directly, your best hope is to gather a tremendous number of nucleons for it to interact with, wait an incredibly long period of time, and devise a device surrounding it capable of detecting even a single potential collision while distinguishing it from any background signals. That was the exact idea behind LUX, the Large Underground Xenon detector. A diagram of the LUX detector. Image credit: LUX Collaboration, diagram by David Taylor, James White and Carlos Faham. After a 20…

New-ish Blog, Small World

I'm cleaning out some old saved items from my RSS feeds, to prepare for some changes at ScienceBlogs, and one of the items I had marked but never done anything with was an announcement of the launch of Correlations, a group blog from Wired Science and PBS. It suffers a bit from the Wired aesthetic of posterizing photographs so as to make them unrecognizable, but at least it's black text on a white background, so PBS has had some moderating influence. They've got a good collection of science bloggers, including Clifford Johnson of Asymptotia and ScienceBlogs' own Tara Smith and Sheril…

Unitary Evolution in Tight Shorts

Terence Tao explains quantum theory as a game of Tomb Raider: Imagine first that Lara is about to navigate a tricky rolling boulder puzzle, when she hears a distant rumbling sound - the sound of her player saving her game to disk. From the perspective of the player, what happens next is the following: Lara navigates the boulder puzzle but fails, being killed in the process; then the player restores the game from the save point and then Lara successfully makes it through the boulder puzzle. Now, how does the situation look from Lara's point of view? At the save point, Lara's reality diverges…

Utahns have something to do tomorrow night

Carel Brest van Kempen is going to be at the Hogle Zoo on Friday evening, showing off his artwork. We have fond memories of the zoo; our apartment was just down the road from it in Salt Lake City when we lived there, and when the kids were at that perfect age to be enthusiastic about it all. (Salt Lake City, despite the weird religion everywhere, is actually a wonderful place to raise kids; when we atheists take over the country, we have to remember to build zoos and big parks and lots of schools in our cities.) Admission is free from 7-9pm. If we were living a little closer, we'd be there—if…