Clearing the stack

Here are some links that have been piling up in my browser tabs this week:

NY Times: “Scientists Find a Shared Gene in Dogs With Compulsive Behavior”

Afarensis links the Google Books archive of Darwinism Illustrated by George Romanes (1892).

Julien Riel-Salvatore links a new paper on projectile point dynamics by the Mythbusters.

In the arXiv: “To Understand Congress, Just Watch the Sandpile”

It turns out that the way a particular resolution gains support can be accurately simulated by the avalanches that occur when grains of sand are dropped onto each other to form a pile.

Gene Expression: “Rice, alcohol and genes” reviews evidence for the origin of an adaptive ADH1B variant in China.

The Scholarly Kitchen: “Why Hasnt Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?”

The Dynamist links to a a 1927 film review of Metropolis by author H. G. Wells. He didn’t like the movie:

Torches are Christian, we are asked to suppose; torches are human. Torches have hearts. But electric hand-lamps are wicked, mechanical, heartless things. The bad, bad inventor uses quite a big one.

The Wall Street Journal says that fashion trends are out. Unless you count steampunk. Maybe it’s all microtrends now.