According to the Telegraph.
New book, blog
Read any books written by your neighbors? I just finished “A Year Without ‘Made in China’: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy” by Sara Bongiorni, a freelance journalist who also lives in Baton Rouge. The book was a gift from another neighbor, who I believe bought it from the author in a …
Ban Mylar Balloons
I saw this offbeat op-ed in today’s LA Times that calls for the banning of mylar balloons in California as they can short out power lines and cause black-outs. The author, a state senator who introduced a bill to this effect, says Southern California Edison claims there were 470 black-outs in its service area caused …
Tracing Humanity’s Path
I just stumbled across this article that came out a couple of weeks ago, describing a statistical modeling study using genomic evidence that attempts to map how our species spread from Africa to populate the rest of the world. I’m really surprised this hasn’t gotten more play in the press. What I found most interesting …
Prosthetic Beak
Didn’t know if you had seen this interesting item last week about an injured bald eagle in a sanctuary in Idaho that is being fitted with a prosthetic beak. The final version will be made of titanium.
More on Isolated Tribes
John Noble Wilford has an expanded treatment on isolated primitive tribal groups that I briefly posted on last week. Apparently there are about 100 left, half of which are in Amazonia. Many of the rest are in Papua New Guinea. As I said said before, it’s astonishing to me that there are this many left …
More Pretties
I keep forgetting to put in a better pic of the Stephen Grant sidelever. So: ancient (1889) English Best gun, resting on a relatively modern kilim I picked up in Sanliurfa on the Kurdish tazi expedition,
Sunday Pix
On Sunday this time of the year we do a lot of stuff around the house, garden, with birds etc. Patrick Porter of the Pigeon list (also a bird hunter, botanist, horticulturist, and damned good writer), sent Libby a bunch of huge Dahlia tubers. (Wish I had thought to show scale– some of these are …
Third Anniversary
Rebecca’s post about the fifth anniversary of her blog just reminded me to check that yesterday was the third anniversary of Querencia.
Marked-up Birds become Sexier
I was intrigued by this story in USA Today earlier this week and Chas beat me to getting a post up about it. “Using a $5.99 marker, scientists darkened the rust-colored breast feathers of male New Jersey barn swallows, turning lighter birds to the level of those naturally darkest. They had already found, in a …