Beyond irony: Mao Tse Tung is now considered to be a diety dedicated to making people rich. Hat tip Chas.
Category: Uncategorized
Turkish Toilet Blogging??
No, not the kind with the slit in the floor, which in variations from modern to disgusting is common in the east. I’m talking about a pic that our friend Christina sent, taken in Istanbul: Turns out it does NOT say “No blogging on the loo”. Professor Janet Jones, one of our intrepid band in …
House Finch
Anne Price at the Raptor Education Foundation sent this photo of an oddly- marked house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) trapped at a banding station. They seem to be an exceptionally variable species, with males in particular varying from almost all red to brown with just traces of red. Could this have something to do with the …
Marketing
Reid sent this interesting NYT piece on publishers selling books in non- traditional venues like sporting goods stores and delis. Matt mused: “Eagle Dreams on table with wilderness gear at outfitters store… “Edge of the Wild dual-billed at Whole Foods with the authentic Italian meats AND in pasta isle… “Tiger Country [ unpublished novel] at …
Dinosauroids and Nemo Ramjet
Darren, while still tormenting us over the cladistics of the Giant Hoatzins of Doom, has written a good post on the “dinosauroids” of popular imagination (and, as Reid reminds us , of the splendid science fiction novels of Ken MacLeod). He doubts the humanoid appearance of the early model, and prefers a “birdier” version by …
The Food Police..
…are coming for you. I never met a trans- fat I liked. But doesn’t this give you a shiver? “New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, by contrast, likes the idea. On Monday he reiterated that support, saying, ‘The next big health issue is obesity. If you want to do something about it, it’s going to …
The Eyes Have It
Now that our children are adults and aren’t around so much to educate me, I find that I am often late catching on to new trends and new products. But I have to say that I hadn’t seen these candy gummy eye balls until this Halloween. They really crack me up. I’m almost afraid to …
Agnostic
I blogged recently on Rod Dreher’s moving account of his conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Last week the one and only John Derbyshire wrote an essay on his loss of religious faith. I thought I must be nuts to like both, finding them sane and thoughtful. But apparently I am not alone– both Dreher himself and …
H. neanderthalensis – H. sapiens Interbreeding?
The BBC reports that the question has come up again as to whether early modern humans and Neanderthals, whose occupation of Europe overlapped, interbred. This new speculation is based on radiocarbon dating and re-examination of 30,000 year old skeletal material from a cave site in Romania. The bones (cranium shown above) are said to show …
Phorusrhacids
Ah, synchronicity! The press release on “terror birds” that I posted on last week came just as Darren Naish was finishing a literature review of phorusrhacids. You can read the first of a series of posts on these big critters over here at Darren’s Tetrapod Zoology.