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esiegel | June 24, 2012"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -Groucho Marx
Now that the solstice is behind us and summer is officially here (for most of us), it's time to start enjoying the greatest fruits of the season. With the technical difficulties of the great scienceblogs migration (hopefully) behind us, I think I've discovered how to successfully bring a weekly song back to my weekend posts, too! Have a listen to Aimee Mann as she sings one of my favorites of hers,
Little Bombs.
Out where I live, in Oregon, now is the season that one of my favorite fruits…
laelaps | March 23, 2010
A stuffed cougar (Puma concolor), photographed in natural history collection at the New Jersey State Museum.
esiegel | April 15, 2008I was doing a little research into the history of telescopes, and it was about a century ago that they finally realized how much more potential light-gathering power reflecting telescopes had as compared to the older refracting telescopes. On Mt. Wilson in California, astronomer George Ellery Hale and optician George Willis Ritchey (back then everybody was named George -- look it up!) were embarking on a program to build large reflecting telescopes as the wave-of-the-future of Astronomy.
But even before this telescope was operational, Hale and Ritchey were thinking of bigger and bigger…
laelaps | October 31, 2007
Happy Halloween, everyone! In searching for a somewhat frightening image (I already recently used Prestosuchus and Amphicyon), I recalled this photo of the AMNH Tyrannosaurus rex mount. Most of the photos I have of the reconstruction are of the whole head or body, but I especially like this one for far more subtle reasons; the close-up makes it appear as if the dinosaur is just beginning to open its jaws, my imagination filling in the sound of heavy breaths escaping the cavernous tooth-lined maw.
laelaps | October 26, 2007
Yesterday my friend Julia commented that one of the best times to visit a museum is in the late afternoon during the winter, and these two photographs will give you some idea why. While the fourth floor of the AMNH is usually bathed in natural lighting during most of the day and artificial lighting from above during the evening, there's a few minutes during the winter months while the sun is getting low in the sky but the overhead illumination hasn't come on yet, a time when shadows sweep across the ancient bones. These two photographs of the "Bear Dog" Amphicyon were taken during that short…