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Why so many languages? Programming languages, Computation, and Math.

Back at my old digs last week, I put up a post about programming languages and types. It produced an interesting discussion, which ended up shifting topics a bit, and leading to a very interesting question from one of the posters, and since the answer actually really does involve math, I'm going to pop it up to the front page here. In the discussion, I argued that programmers should know and use many different programming languages; and that that's not just a statement about todays programming languages, but something that I think will always be true: that there will always be good reasons…

Tet Zoo = back in business

Well, the whole 'distributed denial of service' thing has done a pretty effective job of keeping me away from Tet Zoo entirely. No chance to blog, and not even the chance to look at the site at all - so, wow, thanks for keeping the protobats discussion going (97 98 comments... not bad). While those jolly nice people at ScienceBlogs tech support have just unblocked my IP address, it seems that lots of readers remain blocked - I see Tet Zoo sliding down the ratings a bit over on Nature Blog Network. Yikes, fifth place! Anyway, I'm just about ready to start deluging Tet Zoo with the enormous…

Slaughter in St Paul! Massacre in Minnesota! Mayhem in the Midwest!

Ah, this is going to be painfully dreary. Why do I let myself get dragged into these podium battles with kooks? I'm committed, anyway. Come on out to the UMTC next month for a game of kick-the-puppy. I'm going to be coming down off a real high that weekend, the IGERT symposium on evo-devo, where I'm actually going to learn something, and the next day I have to stand up with these clowns. Do me a favor and show up to ask some leading questions about science in the Q&A so I can talk about some interesting stuff. This is the ad copy from the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. They're…

Tet Zoo picture of the day # 24

Hello loyal readers: I know you're still there. Yet again I can't resist the lure of posting something new when I really shouldn't. Most of you, I'm sure, think that archaeopterygids - the archaic basal birds of Late Jurassic Germany (and Portugal too if Weigert's (1995) identification of isolated teeth is correct) - are long extinct, but here is evidence indicating otherwise. Ha ha ha. This is actually a monument at Dotternhausen in Bavaria; it's near a bridge that crosses the Altmühl, but I forget the exact location. If you want to see more of those archaeopterygid statues... ... below is…

Better Glue for Manifolds

After my [initial post about manifolds](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/10/manifolds_and_glue.php), I wanted to say a bit more about gluing. You can form manifolds by gluing manifolds with an arbitrarily small overlap - as little as a single point along the point of contact between the manifolds. The example that I showed, forming a spherical shell out of two circles, used a minimal overlap. If all you want to do is show that the topology you form is a manifold, that kind of trivial gluing is sufficient, and it's often the easiest way to splice things together. But there are a lot of…

Set Cardinalities and the Cardinal Numbers

One of the strangest, and yet one of the most important ideas that grew out of set theory is the idea of cardinality, and the cardinal numbers. Cardinality is a measure of the size of a set. For finite sets, that's a remarkably easy concept: count up the number of elements in the set, and that's its cardinality. But there are interesting questions that we can ask about the relative size of different sets, even when those sets have an infinite number of elements. And that's where things get really fun. We've already seen an example of how to compare the cardinality of different infinite sets:…

Programming with Shapes: Clunk

Today's bit of pathology is a really silly, and really fun language called Clunk, with a downloadable package containing a perl implementation here. I'm not sure that it's Turing compete, but my best guess is that it is. It's another two dimensional language, but it's very different from any of the other 2d languages that we've look at, because it doesn't rely on an instruction pointer moving around the playfield; instead, it computes by creating an image by fitting together pieces according to some pre-determined rules. A Clunk program consists of a file containing a set of shapes. A shape…

Books for Young Mathgeeks: "A Place for Zero"

I recently had the opportunity to get hold of a collection of children's picture books with math stories. A fellow scienceblogger had been contacted by a publisher, who offered to send review copies of their books to interested SBers. The publisher turned out to be the folks who publish the "Sir Cumference" books. My wife bought me a copy of the first of that series as a joke, and my daughter immediately appropriated it, and absolutely loved it. So I requested copies of a large bunch of their math adventures, and I'll be posting reviews as my daughter and I finish them. The first one that…

Basics: Algebra

Basics: Algebra While I was writing the vectors post, when I commented about how math geeks always build algebras around things, I realized that I hadn't yet written a basics post explaining what we mean by algebra. And since it isn't really what most people think it is, it's definitely worth taking the time to look at. Algebra is the mathematical study of a particular kind of structure: a structure created by taking a set of (usually numeric) values, and combining it with some operations operate on values of the set. One of the simplest examples of a kind of algebra is a simple group. A…

Math: Progressive or Reactionary?

A reader sent me a link to this, thinking that it would be of interest to me, and he was absolutely right. I actually needed to let it sit overnight before writing anything because it made me so angry. I've come to realize that probably one reason I struggled with algebra, geometry et.al., was that it seemed to me that these were basically reactionary academic disciplines, useful for designing weaponry or potentially repressive computer technology, but not with any obvious humanistic or social positive uses. If I'm wrong about this, I'd appreciate it if people could show me how this…

'Tis a Tet Zoo Christmas extravaganza

In time-honoured fashion, once more it's time to wish you all best Christmas wishes and share with you my digital 'Christmas card'... though if you're a regular correspondent or one of my Facebook friends you'll already have seen it, sorry... A larger version is available on request. You'll note a random assortment of real and not-so-real tetrapods. Qilin parungulatus comes from this article, Anachrodactylus is explained here, and the idea that Deinocheirus might have been an arboreal slothosaur is discussed here (the idea is certainly erroneous, by the way). The giant pongine is, obviously…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Female Water Striders Expose Their Genitalia Only After Males 'Sing': Chang Seok Han and Piotr Jablonski at Seoul National University, Korea have found that by evolving a morphological shield to protect their genitalia from males' forceful copulatory attempts, females of an Asian species of water strider seem to "win" the evolutionary arms race between the sexes. Instead, females only expose their genitalia for copulation after males produce a courtship "song" by tapping the water surface. African Bird Species Could Struggle To Relocate To Survive Global Warming: African bird species could…

Mac Brunson, Baptist tyrant and greedy Pharisee

What can we expect of a theocracy? One thing is for sure: you won't be able to criticize the church or church leadership. Here's an example from Florida. Mac Brunson is the pastor of one of those awful megachurches, an organization that has been growing fast and sucking up lots of money for expansion. A member of his flock who was a bit concerned at the direction the church was taking set up a blog, FBC Jax Watchdog, and anonymously expressed dismay at the way the church was being run. I saw possible abuses at our church shortly after our new pastor arrived, regarding acceptance of a $307,000…

Blogrolling: FYI: Science!

Every now and then I bump into a brand new science blog that immediately grabs my attention for some or other aspect of total coolness (or is it 'hotness' these days?). And then I want to promote, promote, promote until everybody and their mother reads that blog. Here is the latest brilliant discovery I made - FYI: Science! Check out some of the first posts, for instance: Of pedigrees and people ....But those mutations have to come from somewhere... specifically, my parents. So my parents had to know about all of this. I sat them down and explained everything to them. I drew them a pedigree…

Academic Evolution

Academic Evolution is Gideon Burton's blog, intended as a playground for posting drafts and eliciting feedback while he is writing a book of the same title. You can see the rough outline of the proposed contents of the book here: This blog is intended to become Academic Evolution, the book. My model is Chris Anderson, whose Long Tail blog helped bring about his seminal book of the same name. Similarly, I am beta testing my ideas, developing them in keeping with the principle of transparency and with the goal of inviting public review and collaboration. I'm smart enough to know others are…

Meetings I'd like to go to....Part VII

***************************************************************************** CALL FOR PAPERS International Conference for Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web (ICSD2009) September 8-11, 2009 - University of Trento, Trento (ITALY) ***************************************************************************** Digital libraries, in the central view of the term, focus on storing and organizing digital objects and providing access to these objects through professional or user-generated metadata or content-based search (full text, image content, full musical score). In an expanded view, DLs…

Lawrence Lessig on Open Access, Copyright and the nasty Conyers bill

John Conyers and Open Access: Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn't like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they've adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition -- they've gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don't like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can't even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually…

Self-Censorship in Science Museums

From Museum 2.0, a marvelous blog I discovered last night: Self-Censorship for Museum Professionals: There are lots of things visitors can't do in museums. But what about the things that museum professionals can't (or feel they can't) do? This week at the ASTC conference, Kathy McLean, Tom Rockwell, Eric Siegel and I presented a session called "You Can't Do That in Museums!" in which we explored the peculiarities of self-censorship in the creation of museum exhibitions. ----------------------------- 1. Self-censorship is different in different museum types. In science and technology…

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: The Relative Influence of Competition and Prey Defenses on the Phenotypic Structure of Insectivorous Bat Ensembles in Southern Africa: Deterministic filters such as competition and prey defences should have a strong…

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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Imitation of Body Movements Facilitated by Joint Attention through Eye Contact and Pointing in Japanese Monkey: Eye contact and pointing are typical gestures in order to direct another individual's attention toward a target. We previously investigated on Japanese monkeys whether joint attention ability encouraged by eye contact and pointing was associated…

Our Seed Overlord: Interview with Virginia Hughes

When you hear SciBlings mention "our Seed Overlords", they are talking about Ginny, our new Commander-in-Chief and Royal Cat-herder. At the Science Blogging Conference three weeks ago, she herded (almost) 20 of us in Real Life to take the famous group photo. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? I'm Ginny, a 20-something NYC science writer, low-traffic blogger, and the new Community Manager at ScienceBlogs. I did neuroscience research in college, decided--…

New on...

Food: Where's the schmaltz? Look no further... How religious curbs lead to great food (take with a grain of salt....and pepper and garlic). My mother's sarma recipe will come shortly... Drink: Ask the expert on vodka: Just Like Water, But Better What are you drinking tonight at midnight? The Friday Fermentable: Champagne and Sparkling Wines for New Year's Good news for the liver cirrhosis (and the grapevine genome): Eat, Drink and Be Merry (but Not Too Much) Books: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (which I have reviewed ealrier this year) is now available, in its entirety, on the Web, for free (…

New and Exciting in PLoS Community Journals

On Fridays I look at the new stuff published on PLoS community journals, i.e., PLoS Pathogens, Neglected Tropical Diseases, Genetics and Computational Biology. Here are my picks for this week: The Per2 Negative Feedback Loop Sets the Period in the Mammalian Circadian Clock Mechanism: Network models of biological systems are appearing at an increasing rate. By encapsulating mechanistic detail of chemical and physical processes, mathematical models can successfully simulate and predict emergent network properties. However, methods are needed for analyzing the role played by individual…

Where do Satan et al. publish, anyway?

I am sometimes accused of having a sense of humor. This base canard is completely unfounded; I merely have great material sent to me. For example, this is an actual abstract for a paper given at the 2004 Baramin Study Group conference. Just try to read it without laughing out loud. The Origins of Natural Evil Gordon Wilson New St. Andrews College In a cursory survey of life it is obvious that a vast number of species spanning most kingdoms and phyla have features that are teleologically designed to deal out disease and/or death. Many pathogens, parasites, and predators have sophisticated…

My picks from ScienceDaily

In Promiscuous Antelopes, The 'Battle Of The Sexes' Gets Flipped: In some promiscuous species, sexual conflict runs in reverse, reveals a new study. Among African topi antelopes, females are the ones who aggressively pursue their mates, while males play hard to get. (which Kate explained a few days ago - is ScienceDaily that slow?) Dinosaur Mummy Found With Fossilized Skin And Soft Tissues: The amazing discovery of one of the finest and rarest dinosaur specimens ever unearthed -- a partially intact dino mummy found in the Hell Creek Formation Badlands of North Dakota was made by 16-year-old…

Welcome Home

I am piggybacking from home on my beloved mac laptop (I wish I could afford my own wifi connection). I am just going to free-associate here for a few minutes for those of you who are interested to read such random things. One random thing I wanted to mention is that it has been 115 days ago when I was first hospitalized, for those of you who keep track of such things -- just to put some perspective on things. I have discovered one typographical error on a label for my medications that could cause me some real problems by triggering a manic episode, but I am smart enough to figure things out…

Tangled Bank: Appeal for Submissions

I already have two articles for my issue of Tangled bank, which will be published on 15 March, but I need more! Tangled Bank is a Blog Carnival that is actively seeking submissions of your blogged essays, opinion pieces, poetry, and cartoons that present or discuss topics that affect the natural (biological) world. As such, the guidelines describing what is appropriate subject material are very broad: basically; your submission must be about science, nature or medicine, and it must have been published within the past two or three months on a blog. I am pleased to announce that I will be…

Wild Vervet Monkeys Wreak Havoc in Kenya

tags: vervet monkey, Cercopithecus aethiops, sexual harassment, Nachu, Kenya, behavior, interspecies communication A young vervet monkey, Chlorocebus pygerythrus. Image: shashamane. If you live in the small village of Nachu in Kenya, watch out, because a group of approximately 300 marauding monkeys is out to steal your food, sexually harass your women and attack and kill your livestock! In a truly amazing incidence of interspecies communication, a group of vervet monkeys, Chlorocebus pygerythrus, is using sexual harassment to intimidate women and children, who are responsible for growing…

Mystery Bird: Semipalmated plover, Charadrius semipalmatus

tags: Semipalmated plover, Charadrius semipalmatus, birds, nature, Image of the Day [Mystery bird] Semipalmated plover, Charadrius semipalmatus, photographed at Smith Point, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 7 September 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/1250s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Read a beautifully written and detailed analysis supporting the ID of this species below .. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: We birders love the technical terms of our trade, delighting…

Champion Racehorse Genuine Risk Dead

tags: racehorses, Genuine Risk, Kentucky Derby, horse racing, streaming video Genuine Risk, pictured at age 30, was the oldest living Kentucky Derby winner. She was living at the Newstead Farm in Upperville, Va. when she died. Image: Carol T. Powers for The New York Times. The bright chestnut filly named Genuine Risk thrilled me when she won the Kentucky Derby in 1980 with commanding style. Not only did she win, but she ran the last quarter mile of the race faster than any other horse ever had, except the amazing Secretariat, who went on to win the Triple Crown of American horseracing in…

Mothership Question #3

Every week, Seed asks us a question, Ask a ScienceBlogger, and they will link to our responses in a "blog carnival" on the following Wednesday. Our responses are limited to 300 words or less. Question: If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be? I am not too keen to shake anyone, but I do think a lot of problems could be solved if the public understood what the scientific method is. Basically, scientists use the scientific method to construct a reality-based representation of the universe that is not clouded with wishful thinking. The…

Ask A Biologist - prettier and better than ever

Ask A Biologist, a wonderful site where experts answer all your questions about biology: This is a site aimed mostly at school kids and is devoted to providing the best scientific information available to anyone who is interested in any aspect of biology (the study of life) including palaeontology (the study of the history of life). But don't be put off; we accept questions from anyone who asks - whatever their age! We want to take you beyond the classroom - if you want to know more on any subject that interests you, then ask us and we will help you to find the answer. Everything you see here…

URGENT: We Have 24 Hours to Stop The Most Deadly Bird Pesticide

I just received this emergency email from the American Bird Conservancy. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is poised to make a decision on whether to ban the bird-killing pesticide, carbofuran. This is the most deadly pesticide to birds currently being used in the United States. It is more toxic than DDT. A single drop is enough to kill a bird. The ABC just learned that because of pressure from the manufacturer, FMC corporation, the EPA may make act like a bunch of governmental whores by making the wrong decision to elect to keep this pesticide on the market. We have 24 hours…

Republican-English Dictionary

Image source. A published author who now is a friend of mine after I reviewed his book sent me some words that he found in a top-secret copy of the Republican-English Dictionary. He noted that these words and their definitions are useful for those of us who have been recently experiencing difficulties deciphering speeches and news reports delivered by the current administration. But it's top seekrit, so don't tell them that we know! Shhh! Words stolen from the top-secret Republican-English Dictionary; alternative energy sources n. New locations to drill for gas and oil. bankruptcy n…

Get ready for Comfort

The ever-hilarious Ray Comfort will be on radio station WDAY shortly, at 10am Central — tune in and leave your rebuttals, humorous sneers, brutal put-downs, and random comments here. I'll be on the same station, same time tomorrow. Question: Explain what intelligent design is? Answer: Everything is intelligently designed, it didn't happen by accident. Explosions don't produce order, they produce chaos. When he became a Christian, he claims he couldn't find evidence to back up evolution. No species-to-species transitions in the fossil record. He actually says this: Dogs do not have chickens…

There's Gold in them thar Spacecraft: LISA 6

The actual LISA spacecraft Or, one of the three modules. That is a 1.96 kg cube of 3/4 gold, 1/4 platinum. The actual LISA spacecraft, in a very real sense, is three of those, separated by 5 million kms. At about $600 per ounce, that is a little over $100,000 of precious metal. Each of these is surrounded by about a 2 m "saucer", which is the auxilliary spacecraft. Somewhat amusingly, depending on how you do your accounting, the ~ 300kg of epoxy, metal, optics and electronics wrapped around the gold/platinum cube is the expensive part. Per unit mass the chunk of gold is the cheapest part…

Indirect Darkness

So I've been hanging out at the Indirect and Direct Detection of Dark Matter conference this week, and been struck by several things. It is a good meeting, enthusiastic crowd, definite excitement in the air. It would have read much better if the title had been "Direct and Indirect Detection of Dark Matter", but that would have been wrong... This is not my usual turf, though I was on a couple of papers on the adiabatic contraction of collisionless matter during growth of supermassive black holes, which is a way to get very high dark matter densities (QHS95 and SHQ95). Basically a "spike" in…

NRC: the rankings

The NRC rankings are out. Penn State Astronomy is ranked #3 - behind Princeton and Caltech. W00t! PSU doing the mostest with the leastest. The Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs by the National Research Council, for 2010, is out, reporting on the 2005 state of the program. The full data set is here EDIT: PhDs.org has a fast rank generator by field. Click on the first option (NRC quality) to get R-rankings, next button ("Research Productivity") to get the S-rankings, or assign your own weights to get custom ranking. Astronomy S-Rankings: Princeton Caltech Penn State Berkeley…

I hear that...

More State Universities are going to furloughs... And the funding agencies may agree to let faculty take salary from grants for furloughs. This is not a good thing, furloughs are rational if sharp cuts are a short term necessity, because they avoid long term job losses and they can be implemented rapidly. Furloughs are also not paycuts - they preserve the benefits and retirement at the base level, and are done with the intent of salaries going back to previous level without having to go through an increase. This is a rather important distinction, in the short term at least, if situations…

Man in the Middle

Our astrobiology graduate seminar has started, and last week it got interesting as we pondered "weird life". I'm a co-PI of the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center, and as part of our program we run an Astrobiology graduate seminar, which is generally topic based. This year it is more student oriented, but occasionally the faculty are invited to kibitz. Last week the theme was "Weird Life" - we fling this at all groups of students we can gather in astrobiology, in the hope that someone will eventually have a flash of insight. The essential topic is: "if there is life out there that is…

winning with vinegar

Penn State engineers have come up with an interesting twist on fuel production, coming up with a cell that very efficiently produces hydrogen Here is the NSF headline press release on this The cell uses microbial fermentation of acetic acid to generate hydrogen, but with a twist. Oh, and the technique also works (not as well) for cellulose, which is the prima plant waste material we all would like to find something useful to do with. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words: Click for high-res version. Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation The basic idea is one of…

pending planets

Last week we had an inaugural meeting for our new "Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds". There were some interesting talks and new planets aplenty Mayor was there and presented some preliminary results, and hinted at upcoming, but as yet unpublished results. Current radial velocity sensitivity is better than 1 m/sec on the HARPS instrument, over a 4 year baseline, so far. They are doing a survey of a sub-sample of 200 stars from the CORALIE survey, with high cadence - doing frequent observing over several nights and then longer intervals, but adapting to hints of signals. This gets a…

a brief history of big physics

Physics used to be simple: the universe was eternal, static and predictable... but there were dark clouds on the horizon. First there was uncertainty, evidence of decay. Lack of conservation. Then all became relative. Transmutable, interchangable, in a revolutionary way. There was sudden change, lack of predictability. A statistical world. Only identical mass aggregates mattered. Some gathered collectively, others became exclusive. There were hints of underlying degeneracies. Evidence was found that things were falling apart, despite noble attempts to maintain our world stationary. First…

random nibblets

just had an occasion to zip about the country a bit, and feel a need to free-associate random bits of anecdotal impression The US Senate has stopped vote on the stimulus package, for tonight. In the process of bipartisan cutting the package seems to have grown by few tens of billions. Couple of days ago I was in line at a university cafeteria. A well dressed young woman was holding up the line while she asked for a custom pack of sushi be made up - not someone to eat a 20 minute old pack of california roll, her. But, oops, she had no money, and no funds left in her pre-paid campus card. No…

Update on the Smiling Bird Rediscovery

tags: recurve-billed bushbird, Clytoctantes alixii, ornithology, birds, avian, endangered species Chris Sharpe, an Associate Researcher with ProVita in Venezuela, contacted me (initially through my friend, Ian) regarding this entry about the "smiling bird" that I wrote and he would like to clarify several things for all of you. This message is especially intended for the ornithological and conservation communities; [I wish to thank my Seattle bird-pal, Ian, for his concern about this issue as well as his long-term attention to my Birds in the News newsletter. I am more than happy to set the…

Forty Signs of Rain

tags: global warming, LabLit, science fiction, book review A friend of mine who is an editor at Random House Publishers sent me a fascinating book about global warming that I think qualifies as "LabLit." LabLit is short for "Laboratory Literature"; a new genre of fictional science literature that realistically portrays scientists working and living during contemporary times. This book, Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (NYC, Bantam Books: 2004), is a peek into the lives of scientist, Anna Quibler, who works for the National Science Foundation (NSF), and her stay-at-home husband,…

This Guy Should Lose His Credentials

tags: tuberculosis, TB, Andrew Speaker, infectious diseases Did you hear that the man who was infected with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) is an affluent marital and personal-injury attorney? It turns out that this selfish, idiotic dope who should know better, went on his honeymoon through Europe, knowing he had TB. While overseas, the infected man, Andrew Speaker (pictured right; image source), exposed hundreds of people to his very dangerous strain of TB before finally returning to the United States -- against federal health officials' warnings -- by driving across the…

Cicadas Plead for Love

tags: cicada, 17-year cicada, Magicicada "Cicada" Image: Wikipedia. After seventeen years underground, immature cicadas are now emerging as full-fledged adults, ready to breed. Adult cicadas live, feed, and breed above ground for approximately two to six weeks before they die. The dark-colored insects are between one and two inches long with transparent veined wings, prominent red eyes and undeniable acoustic talents: the males produce a tremendously loud courtship song that sounds like a combination of a whirring blender and a lawn mover. Basically, cicadas are the most efficient and…

Mystery Bird: Northern Rough-winged Swallow, Stelgidopteryx serripennis

tags: Northern Rough-winged Swallow, Stelgidopteryx serripennis, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Northern Rough-winged Swallow, Stelgidopteryx serripennis, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2006 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2006:03:12 09:45:40 Exposure Time: 1/249 F-Number: 14.00 ISO: 200 Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Look at those wings! They're obviously long, and we can roughly quantify their…

Birdbooker Report 38

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "One cannot have too many good bird books" --Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927). The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird…