Neandertal anti-defamation files, 22
This, from ScienceAlert:
All posts tagged with humor
A paleoanthropological Thanksgiving
This is Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S., and friends on my social feeds have been forwarding a proverb: “When you have more than you need, build a longer ta...
Link: XKCD on overthinking the paleo lifestyle
Another view on paleo lifestyles:
Link: Neandertal marketing
From PC World: “Neanderthals vs. Homo sapiens - Lessons Learned”
‘Don’t try to out-nerd us’
Me: “So apparently today is the tenth anniversary of the first Eccleston episode.”
Link: An ideal rejection letter for a faculty job
Female Science Professor has a new post, “Contest Entry: Rejection Letters, 3”, which presents what must be the most ideal rejection letter for a faculty job...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 21
Chris Mooney reviews the book, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us by Avi Tuschman, in an article in Washington Monthly: “The O...
The long war of the lumpers and splitters
This explains a lot. Nobody likes lumpers:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 20
I was just telling an audience of 500 the other day that Neandertals were really not very much like professional athletes. Now this, from BusinessWeek: “NFL ...
Mich-shuggeneh
From The Onion:
"I Believe in Gene Flow"
Mindy Pitre forwarded me a video done by her undergraduate students at St. Lawrence University, and I just had to share it. It is about as adorable as cavema...
How mad scientists are made
Talking to my clones today during their St. Patrick’s Day preparations:
The stress-free professoriate
I have to drive some more traffic to this post on Forbes’ website (“The least stressful jobs of 2013”), because it has me laughing out loud. Number one on th...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 17
Let no one say that I’m an uncritical voice about the many advantages of releasing preprints. They do have their downsides. Lack of editing is one.
Moonies of Bethesda
Highly recommended for Friday: Michael Eisen on “Is the NIH a cult?”
Prehistoric fantasy league
Brian Palmer: “Who Would Win in a Fight: a Modern Human or a Neanderthal?”
MacGuffin
The headline of this Guardian story really says it all: “Priceless Tibetan Buddha statue looted by Nazis was carved from meteorite”.
Neanders got no reason
Razib Khan raises the question whether Neandertal cloning could be ethical, and a varied comment thread quickly ensues.
The Woody Allen of animals
I’ve been offline for the past several days on a family vacation. So I get back and what do I find in my feed reader?
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 16
Barbara King joins the Neandertal Anti-Defamation League with her new post at NPR: “Giving Neanderthals Some Respect (Especially In An Election Year)”.
Peer review in Castle Wolfenstein
“Peer fortress: The scientific battlefield” uses first-person shooter gaming characters to put a humorous spin on scientific peer review. Six characters that...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 15
David Swindle, writing at PJ Media about George Lucas’ revelation that Han Solo would never have shot first.
Pandagate
I have to note this brouhaha from across the Atlantic: along with Pippa Middleton, Gabrielle Giffords and others…
Quote: Marshall Sahlins on relevance
Marshall Sahlins writing in the pamphlet, Waiting for Foucault, p. 18:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 14
Another Geico commercial tonight during college football bowl season: Geico Caveman is playing Scrabble with some famous NFL player. Caveman plays “CAT” and ...
Over coffee
G: Guess what Daddy and I learned last night? I'm more Neandertal than he is!
Quote: Lord of the tweets
John Scalzi: “Lord of the Tweets”.
Phylogeny capitulates to ontology
I was genome browsing this morning and noticed something strange going on at UCSC.
Hollywood's war on Shakespeare
The New York Times Magazine tries for a new record in academic killjoy columns: “Wouldnt It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasnt Shakespeare?”
Photo
Our Lady of Eternal Osteology:
Fun with Hawass quotes
The Guardian writes about the amazing comeback of Zahi Hawass (“Egypt’s man from the past who insists he has a future”). Whether it’s a comeback or just an u...
Frinking around Titan
From an article about exploring Saturn’s moon, Titan, I have never in my life seen a scientist quote that sounds more like something Professor Frink would sa...
Finals season
This is the time of year when hapless students all over the world turn to my blog to answer their exam questions.
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 13
From The Economist, “What’s wrong with America’s economy?”
"The monkeys shall do bugger all."
Martin Robbins goes ape:
Best open letter ever
I so totally wish I’d thought of this first: “An Open Letter To People Who Think They Have Found The Artifact That Will Change Archaeology As We Know It”
The "gay caveman"
I am just about to go crazy today. I just can’t seem to escape the “gay caveman” story.
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 12
British wine guru, Oz Clarke, of Top Gear-head James May as he teaches him how to judge wine and squash grapes:
Mac attack
From satirical site Glossy News: “Painting of Big Mac Found in Neanderthal Cave”.
Quote: Hrdlicka's blackboard
Here’s a quote from Ales Hrdlicka’s report on “Lansing Man” – a skeleton found near Lansing, Kansas in 1902, which was proposed as extremely early evidence o...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 11
Slate has an editorial by Farhad Manjoo, featuring the idiocy of people who write crank letters to NPR (“We Listen to NPR Precisely To Avoid This Sort of Stu...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 10
Today, it was Senator John Kerry:
Kaku cockup
I can’t bear to watch it again, and I don’t see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can’t sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tel...
Cloven truths
From The Onion:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 9
Why do they have to bring poor Neandertals into it?
Winter's Bone
Before anyone asks: Yes, I’m aware of the Academy’s unfortunate misspelling.
Tomb raiders
Cracked.com features “8 Famous Fictional Archaeologists Who Suck At Their Job”.
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 8
OK, at ScienceOnline2011 I did a little bit of talking about Neandertals represented in art. So this entry in the NAD files truly pains me.
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 7
On tonight’s Hawaii Five-O:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 6
From The Simpsons:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 5
Headline from the Telegraph:
Overheard
GOODWIN: Are atoms made of smaller atoms? ME: No, atoms are made of smaller particles, called protons, neutrons and electrons. GOODWIN: I’m a neutron and you...
Poster Venn
I love the Poster Venn diagram” from Better Posters – stuff people usually put on academic posters intersected with what viewers care about. So I won’t cut a...
Neandertal headlines
For two weeks I’ve been reading news feeds about how volcanoes killed the Neandertals. I mean, seriously:
Neandercomic
A comic-page exposition of Neandertal DNA is online from Scientific American MIND.
Gleek out
OMG! Sue Sylvester said “hominid!”
Gene expunction
So, it’s a perfectly ordinary story about epigenetics and how the methylation of some genes may be correlated with BMI. But what I don’t understand is the he...
Greeks bearing gifts
A reader writes: “A good argument to require introductory anthropology”:
If they have tentacles, will pouring water make a difference?
Well, it looks like the British Science Festival is going to be a whole lot stranger than the World Science Festival was:
Scholarly communication
Savage Minds:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 4
Headline from Radio New Zealand:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 3
Headline from The Telegraph:
Quote: SpongeBob on extra credit
MRS. PUFF: Congratulations, SpongeBob, you pass! SPONGEBOB: But Mrs. Puff, I don't feel like I've really done anything. MRS. PUFF: That's how extra credit is...
Getting the mojo
Man, I wish I’d have thought of this:
Starr
Ringo Starr turns 70 years old today. Many are reminiscing about some music group he was apparently part of. As for myself, I will forever treasure his geniu...
Quote: Homer at the zoo
Homer Simpson, at the zoo:
Neanderate yourself
If you want to give yourself a caveman (or cavewoman) makeover, well, now there’s an app for that:
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 2
The New York Times decided to honor our newfound ancestry with Neandertals by…
Space rock
The Age:
Over coffee
ME: Sophie! You’re lying down on the job, frittering your young life away!
Neandertal anti-defamation league
From the Toronto Sun:
Neandertal anti-defamation league
A real headline:
Quote: Marge Simpson on evolution
The local station is playing the “creationism” episode of The Simpsons today – maybe in honor of Darwin this week? A Marge Simpson quote from the end:
Neandertal metrosexuals
By popular request from scads of readers:
"The cavemen are happy in the modern world"
I blame Harold Dibble. Oh, sure, all these “paleo diet” people point the figure at Loren Cordain, but Dibble was the first to give them a cookbook!
Fiat lux
From The Onion:
Shimmy-shaking
From The Onion:
O. M. says
Happy New Year, from One Million B. C.:
Blammo!
From The Onion:
Neandertals in the news
Here’s the top hit for “Neanderthal” on Google News today:
Luxuriant flowing hair
A club I won’t be joining, from Improbable Research:
Panda diktat
I haven’t been blogging quite as often, but you can see I’ve been busy with other business:
Food notes
I’m laughing so hard it hurts:
Vampire odontology
Lawn Chair Anthropology: “Halloween special: Heterotopy, pleiotropy, and the origins of vampires”
Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius
From a reader, a comparison:
Unpersuaded
EXTREME PILBEAM ON LOVEJOY ACTION!!!!
Giant panda noises
Uhhh…
Pandas stripped from the headlines
A reader forwarded the news about a new baby panda at the San Diego Zoo. Now, I know everybody expects to get their hot panda news here, but the video was ba...
Sports testing metaphors of questionable taste
From the New York Times story about Caster Semenya, “Gender Test After a Gold-Medal Finish”:
Comic: SMBC on Science reporting
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
Over coffee
Scene opens: Geico cavemen bowling commercial
Shamone
Funny, this didn’t stand out to me at the Field when we were there last…
Quote: Earnest Hooton on the trouble with teeth
Earnest Hooton, on p. 170 of Up From the Ape:
Quote: Jerry Hall genetics
There was a really stupid article in the Times (UK) yesterday: “Women are getting more beautiful”. You know I don’t say that lightly. But I had to quote what...
Gwilym of Many Conquests
From The Onion:
The stuff that dreams are made of
It’s like the final scene in The Maltese Falcon:
Quote: Real men don't compare phones
This is random, but John Dvorak writing about the portable phone craze had me laughing:
Quote: Karl Pilkington on being 1.4 percent different from chimpanzees
If you don’t know about Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington, you can read more at this interview of Gervais by Australia’s Asylum. Where Ricky exposes his secr...
Prehistoric Planet
Strange experience of today: hearing Christian Slater explain to me how to integrate myself into australopithecine society.
NY Times: Veterinarian-disguised Mengele brought twins to Brazilian village
A reader sent along this NY Times article about the town in Brazil with an unusual concentration of twins. Naturally, it’s a Boys from Brazil type of scenari...
Making beautiful grunting, er, music together
A recent BBC story described one musician’s attempt to recreate the “Neandertal” musical experience:
Happy Valentine's Day
I naturally select you…
Animal metaphors of questionable case, IX
A nice little blog post on David Reed’s work transmutes into a headline from the Onion:
News connections
Story 1:
Over coffee
GRETCHEN: Crazy Like a Fox? Where do you think you are, 1984?
Testing students with advertising
As you ramp up for finals, you may want to keep your options open:
Panda bites man
And isn’t that always the way?
Quote: We don't need another hero
Julien Riel-Salvatore on peer review:
That is, unless you're on Team Jolie
In the Halloween spirit yet? If not, think about this:
Provenience
Bracey said he bought the skulls as a teenager on a family trip to Egypt. But he buried them years later when his wife said she didn't want them around any l...
Makin' bacon
From the “AntiCraft”: instructions for making the ultimate bacon tiara:
Political ads, 1796 edition
In this political season, those of us in “battleground states” are looking back to the political ads of 1796:
Evolutionary accelerator to start "squirrel smasher"
Biologists to get their own accelerator:
Quote: John Dvorak on those Seinfeld-Gates ads
John Dvorak:
Over coffee
GREEDO: Going somewhere, Solo?
The bovine compass
This is too strange:
Pandas
Finally, a panda story I can get on board with:
Quote: High Priests of Anthropology
Reading through the introduction to Archaeology and Language, by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (1998), I thought this quote was great:
Paisley Caves Jenkins interview
On Monday’s “NewsHour”, PBS ran an interview with archaeologist Dennis Jenkins, who worked on the Paisley Caves human-DNA-containing scat.
Death, lye thou there
Hoowuulyeaaaach!
Animal metaphors of questionable taste, VIII
In an otherwise very interesting story about the mechanism of behavioral dimorphism in fruit fly mating:
Animal metaphors of questionable taste, VII
Not exactly a metaphor, but certainly of questionable taste in this story titled, "'Sex Pest' Seal Attacks Penguin":
Over coffee
John: I got the strangest e-mail today. It was from the University -- they wanted me to fill out "an important survey from Homeland Security."
Quote: Watson's DNA
The teaser to this post on Science Blog:
Nail in the Coffin Watch: Hobbit feet
In a New Scientist story about the feet of H. floresiensis:
First step to panda genetic engineering underway
The first seal is broken, and the Giant Panda Genome Project commences:
Celebrity health quackery, 1
I've been noticing lately an awful lot of stories in which some celebrity blithely espouses total pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo. Since celebrities exist only t...
Beer drinking scientists…vindicated?
Last week's story about the negative correlation between beer consumption and scientific productivity has brought out the cutting crew. In this blog post at...
Quote: Ardipithecus alert!
Owen Lovejoy, quoted in an Ann Gibbons news piece:
Bronze Age Briton buried with beer beaker
This seems like a fitting St. Patrick's Day story:
10,000 B[rainless] C[ontent]?
The movie, 10,000 B.C., blew away the competition last weekend, with an estimated $35.7 million in US box office receipts.
Quote: Dobzhansky on fat
In Mankind Evolving, 1962, p. 310:
Quote: What human evolution tells us about ourselves
Ann Althouse, confronting the Laetoli footprint-makers reconstruction at the American Museum of Natural History:
The Random Scholar: brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt
Reading up on inbreeding depression and deleterious recessive alleles, I happened across a reference to a 1997 paper by W. Scheidel:
Badger underground
They could have just asked...
Quote: Extra credit
Spongebob: But Mrs. Puff, I don't feel like I really did anything.
Quote: Taxonomic versus behavioral outliers
My UW colleague Karen Strier, writing in a comment after a paper by Sayers and Lovejoy on the chimpanzee referent in paleoanthropology:
Animal metaphors of questionable taste: ventro-ventral gorillas
The National Geographic story about gorillas mating in the missionary position is one of those unique science stories: it's full of lines that sound innocuo...
My toddler is not a Neandertal. I only wish he were…
How could I not look at an article headlined, "Coping with the Caveman in the Crib"? It's a health piece by Tara Parker-Pope, profiling "baby whisperer" Har...
Quote: the utility of computers
Writer Jeff Harrell, on hacking together an obscure-but-useful piece of CSS/Javascript:
About that Packers game…
Uhhh...this headline doesn't say it all, but it says enough:
Quote of the day: About that used toaster
Monk, explaining why he won't buy a used toaster, even if it is only five bucks:
Questionable animal metaphors: monkey outsourcing
So, a monkey in North Carolina was controlling a robot in Japan, using only its brain waves.
Quote: experiments and psychological universals
Steven Pinker, on the experiments that drive interpretations about moral intuition:
Quote: Effective population size in the Holocene
My colleague Greg Cochran, commenting on population models with small effective sizes up to the present:
Robot love affairs: the dark side
Product design guru Donald Norman looks at this year's crop of "smart" machines in this NY Times article, and reminds us why future robot sex ain't all it's...
So, don't plan on grinding his bones to make your bread
National Geographic is reporting on an internet hoax: A digitally altered photograph created in 2002 shows a reclining giant surrounded by a wooden platf...
Quote: how immediate was that, again?
Alec Baldwin, appearing in "Walking With Cavemen":
Quote: Darwin on the food chain
From the Origin, second edition, pp. 73-74:
Midichlorians, you done us wrong
TechRepublic blogger Jay Garmon pinpoints the problem with the Star Wars prequels: midichlorians.
Quote: Riel-Salvatore on the "trait list" approach
Julien Riel-Salvatore comments on the hunting Neandertal women (my comment from last year here). Read the whole thing by all means, but I laughed out loud a...
Dawn of the Robopanda
It's cute, it hugs its own little toy, and it's brought to you by WowWee, the same nice people who built the "Alive" Chimpanzee. It's beginning to smell lik...
Quote: Shaggy on the apeman
An apeman is supposed to be dumb. One that smart, I can live without!
Quote: What to do with Daylight Savings Time
Commenter Yajeev, on A Blog Around the Clock:
Quote: Skunk apes
My little girl, Sadie, couldn't sleep last night and we sat up watching a show about the "Skunk Ape" of the South. She loved it! Well, today I happened acro...
Mix it up with menacing macaques
Michelle Tsai of Slate tells what to do when monkeys attack:
Quote: A Mad Men moment
Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) on Mad Men:
Friends, Romans, countrymen…
Has this guy gone over the edge?
Quote: Tobias on Dart's scientific importance
From p. 48 of P. V. Tobias, Dart, Taung, and the Missing Link, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg:
Quote: Dart on the savanna model
Raymond Dart (p. 198 of Australopithecus africanus, the man-ape of South Africa, Nature 115:195-199, 1925), summing up why hominids might have lived in what...
Animal metaphors of questionable taste, IV
In a LiveScience article about how capuchin monkeys wash their hands and feet in urine:
Over coffee
GRETCHEN: You mean that I wouldn't have been tall enough to leave Africa?
What is it with the dots?
From Tuesday's New York Times article:
Quote: Selection is "widely ignored"
From p. xviii-xix of the preface of Selection, by Graham Bell (Chapman and Hall, New York, 1997):
Quote: Not crazy enough to be believed
Attributed to Niels Bohr, in response to Wolfgang Pauli's account of electron spin:
Quote: Darwin's beetle-poppin' youth
Charles Darwin, p. 50 in The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter, vol. 1., edited by Francis Darwin, John Murray, Lond...
Quote: Hooker on skepticism
Joseph Hooker, commenting on an address by Lord Kelvin concerning achievements in mathematics, in a letter to Charles Darwin, August 5, 1871:
Surreal Neandertal quote of the day
Astronomer Christopher Martin, about the star with the tail:
Quote of the day
Bernard Wood, quoted in Ann Gibbons' story about KNM-ER 42700:
Quote of the day
Scooby and the gang, in "Never Ape and Ape Man", 1969:
Panda poop story has legs
My headline being an homage to the legless panda story earlier this month, I note the continued interest in panda dung recycling, which has now combined wit...
The Hawks weblog mailbag
I always get the most interesting mail right after any kind of news interview. Here's the best from last week:
Quote of the day
Ego Seeman, on page 4583 of "Sexual dimorphism in skeletal size, density, and strength," J Clin Endocrin Metabol 86:4576-4584, 2001:
Quote of the day
F. G. Parsons, commenting on the more brachycephalic student body of Cambridge compared to Oxford, in "The Cephalic Index of the British Isles," Man, 22:19-...
Strange factoids, II
From Don Surber, with reference to the music at "Live Earth":
The panda portal
Now, see, here's the thing. I was reading this story about how this panda in Washington D.C., Mei Xiang, isn't pregnant:
Quote of the day
Jim Laidler, quoted in a Slate article about vaccines and autism:
Quote of the day
UK Entertainment Retailers Association co-chairman Paul Quirk, quoted in The Guardian, on Prince's distribution of over 2 million free copies of his new alb...
Quote of the day
Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in the decision of Parents v. Seattle School Board No. 1:
The Random Scholar: What makes monkey scrotums blue?
Another one of those random Google Scholar results:
The house of (not) flying pandas
Problems with panda releases:
Signs of irrelevance
From the NY Times sports section:
Quote of the day
Ernest Hooton, in Up from the Ape (1946, Macmillan, New York: p. 488):
Quote of the day
Answer to the "genetic modification myth," "GM food means that we'd be eating genes and it's not natural to eat another organism's genes,"
What is it with rampaging apes and restaurants?
Is there a subtle hidden plan?
Brood 13
That's what they're calling the imminent invasion of 17-year cicadas that we're supposed to get here next month.
Quote of the day
Business columnist John Brandt, using "Neanderthal Inc." as a stand-in for your typical stupid corporation:
Quote of the day
Daniel Drezner, commenting on why suburbs mark the top ten places to live for "families with children":
Animal metaphors of questionable taste, III
In a press release about the successful application of green bottlefly larvae to cure (by chewing on) foot ulcers in diabetic patients, by University of Man...
I'm not smarter than a fifth-grade caveman
There's this quiz from USA Weekend -- that Sunday newspaper insert magazine:
Animal metaphors of questionable taste, II
From a Carl Zimmer story about the incredibly long phalluses of certain ducks:
Over coffee
JOHN: Now, that's a frightening headline.
Quote of the day
Savage Minds poster Thomas Strong, in reference to blogging:
Quote of the day
Joel Allen (1877:139), quoted in Virginie Millien and colleagues (2006):
Quote of the day
Erik Trinkaus, quoted by the BBC on the Tianyuan skeleton</a>:
Panda pr0n update
If you're waiting for an update on the effectiveness of panda porn -- and I know you are! -- well, here is the story for you:
"The President buys John Hawks"
Gretchen and I have been laughing for twenty minutes at the Sloganizer. They warn of a danger of addiction. So remember, "Step into the light with John Hawk...
Quote of the day
G. H. R. von Koenigswald, in "Early Man: Facts and Fantasy", p. 67:
Quote of the day
Ann Miller in On the Town:
Mr. Potato Head evolution, 1
OK, I have to admit I went looking right away for a Mr. Potato Head picture to illustrate that last story, and what do I find but this:
"Worn down by nearly three decades of peril"
Saw this today from The Onion, it's an oldie but a goodie:
Quote of the day
"Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds, contrasting the idea of trans-fat bans with the infamous fast food rat problem in NYC:
Quote of the day
Local personality Bill Wineke, on the channel 3 news, commenting on the Jesus tomb documentary:
Wacky breakfast conversations
ME: There's this long-running debate about limb proportions in australopithecines. Lucy is sort of humanlike -- she has short arms and long legs.
About that symposium…
Hmmm...
Quote of the day
Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi:
Quote of the day
J. B. S. Haldane, first line of "A mathematical theory of natural and artificial selection" (1924, Trans Camb Phil Soc 23:19-41):
Strange factoids, I
The Cowardly Lion costume in The Wizard of Oz film was made from real lions.
Quote of the day
Gretchen, on the real estate listings for the tiny tax haven, Principality of Sealand, and Romania's Bran Castle, linked to Vlad the Impaler.
Why don't they get it over with and domesticate them?
Pandas, of course. This article about the exceptional 2006 panda birth rate (217) is acccompanied by a photo of a half dozen flopping panda cubs in a pile. ...
Quote of the day
Ann Althouse, deep in the comments wrapping a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest metaphor:
Quote of the day
Tom Kirkwood, in "Ageing: Too fast by mistake", Nature 444:1015: </p>
Quote of the day
G. Ledyard Stebbins, on p. 241 of "The role of hybridization in evolution," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103:231-251, 1959:
A worst toys retrospective
In honor of the season, I ran across Radar Magazine's list of 10 dangerous toys from years gone by.
Quote of the day
New York Times corrections column, on July 17, 1969 (a day after the Apollo 11 launch), referring to a 1920 column that claimed Robert Goddard's rockets cou...
Quote of the day
From p. 1 of Risk, by John Adams:
Quote of the day
Regular Althouse commenter Madison Man, on the story about Neandertal women hunting:
Education imitates The Onion
From The Onion:
Animal metaphors of questionable taste, volume 1
From a story titled, "Porn sparks panda baby boom in China":
Quote of the day
A conversation:
"Skull morphology of giant terror birds"
Found this in Nature a couple of weeks ago:
"Long pig" moniker confirmed by robotic sommelier
Signs that the Japanese robot industry has gone too far:
Anagrams, part 1
I was putting together some anagrams on human evolution-related phrases, which turns out to be a bit of a challenge. I have no idea how hard they are to uns...
Mafia markets mammoth meat?
Has the Hwang Woo-suk scandal jumped the shark?
The panda's thumb
From the AP:
Quote of the day
From the Fortune sources:
Quote of the day
Rachael Ray, in Entertainment Weekly:
Movie synopsis of the day
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), according to Yahoo:
Pandalicious
In the "great minds think alike" category, Gretchen sends me this:
Registering for the meetings
Hmm... How will I explain this charge to Gretchen?
Quote of the day
Milford Wolpoff, in “Neandertals in our family tree”: </p>
Should I be ashamed?
Hmm...
Another panda in an already over-panda-crowded world
You may have heard how I feel about pandas:
Quote of the day
Ann Althouse, on the death of an albino squirrel: </p>
Quote of the day
Franz Weidenreich, in The Scientific Monthly 67, p. 106:
Quote of the day
Dirk Hooijer, writing in Scientific Monthly (72:3-8, 1951):
Quote of the day
John Gibson, on Pluto's demotion:
"A slight edge"
From The Onion:
MS Word as scientific authority
In case you haven't been following the "pluton" controversy, here's a pointer to Nature News on the topic. A pluton is a kind of underground igneous rock fo...
Quote of the day
Writer Brian Alexander, on the future of sex:
Stupidity is relative, to dolphins
In a case of neuroscience resembling the Onion, we have a Reuters article about how stupid dolphins are. It ends with this quote:
Quote of the day:
General Zod, from Superman II, on visiting the Fortress of Solitude:
Hot dogs cause mutations
This just in:
Quote of the day
Ronald M. Green, ethicist, on building the "Bride of Neanderthal":
Currently creeping me out
...is Al Gore, who is staring over my shoulder from the cover of Entertainment Weekly that Gretchen is reading:
The Random Scholar: crayfish urine battles
I think I'll make this a new feature, since all kinds of interesting things pop up in my Google Scholar searches. Here's one:
Eponymy synonymy
With apologies to James Taranto, this from Science Blog caught my eye:
Quote of the day
Metagenomics maven Eddy Rubin, on grinding up some more Neandertals, in Wired:
Fascinated by the monkey chow diet
Is it so wrong that my guilty pleasure this week is reading this man's diary of his experiment in eating only monkey chow?
Meet your new robotic parasite
One of those things that says, "Please stop reading now" :
Chicken vs. egg: a timeless tale
Is this the definition (CNN) of a slow news day?
Quote of the day
Darwin, in a letter to J. D. Hooker (Dec. 12, 1856):
Quote of the day
Claude Shannon, in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (p. 56-57):
Quote of the day
K. S. Lashley (Quarterly Review of Biology 24:28, 1949):
Quote of the day
Jesper Hoffmeyer, in Signs of Meaning in the Universe (translated by Barbara Haveland):
Quote of the day
Karl Popper, in Unended Quest:
Quote of the day
Ann Althouse, on spouting off about topics outside one's expertise:
Quote of the day
Frank Livingstone, in Current Anthropology (5:150, 1964):
Quote of the day
Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature:
Quote of the day
My 5-year-old daughter, Sophie:
Quote of the day
James Lileks, on novice ice skaters:
But what about the laser beams?
I'm catching up on some blogging, and this story in New Scientist has been sitting on my computer for a couple of days:
My next simulation will be quantums
From my secret, "Why I am not a physicist", file:
Today's sweet Valentine story
Couples really do look like each other:
So which mythological paradise is it?
You've probably seen the story about the Foja Mountains in Papua New Guinea. Here are a couple of paragraphs:
Quote of the day
From an Althouse commenter:
Humanzee, Chuman, Robochimp, whatever
I can't believe my #1 Google search this month is "Humanzee". I wrote about King Kong humanzee trivia last month. It sure is an interesting story, about Sov...
The cauliflower curry connection
From Science Blog:
Swineshine on my shoulders makes me happy
I have a history of quality pig-blogging here, and this BBC story has all the right ingredients:
Science news from the Swift Report
If you need a laugh, try this piece of fake news from The Swift Report:
The impending mouse horror
OK, I wouldn't be so concerned about "Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless" (New Scientist):
Welcome! I'll be your pedagogical agent this morning…
My eye was drawn to this LiveScience story about "virtual professors". The idea is that you could get young women more interested in engineering if they had...
Quote of the day
From Cardinal Paul Poupard of the Pontifical Council for Culture (story at News.com.au):
Quote of the day:
From tonight's CSI:
Wild primate urine sampling tenth worst science job
From the "any publicity is good publicity" department: Popular Science's list of the worst jobs in science includes "Orangutan-pee collector".
Quote of the day
Cited in a lecture I heard today, from T. H. Huxley:
A zombie howto
In honor of the season, HowStuffWorks.com has an article on the workings of zombies.
"Ghosts of reviewers past"
Googling something else entirely brought me this page by Edmund D. Brodie III, chronicling a few of the comments from manuscript reviews he's received over ...
Natural selection in action
In honor of Halloween, the Washington Post has a story on extreme pumpkin-growers. It's a great example of massive phenotypic change in a few generations:
Quote of the day
From Jerry Pournelle:
Alien vs. Predator
The AP article ends this way:
Killer Navy cetacean squad unleashed by Katrina?
On the topic of animal intelligence, there is this from The Observer:
Quote of the day
H. L. Mencken:
Quote of the day
From Jerry Pournelle:
Michael Crichton, call your office
On the "Chimpanzee Genome Consortium": Gretchen says that anything involving the words "chimpanzee" and "consortium" creeps her out.
Quote of the day
From Ann Althouse:
Beeffoot
From MSNBC:
Quote of the day
I have to say I love this quote:
"Death Space Habitat" doesn't have a nice ring to it."
National Geographic News is running an interview with space scientists Seth Shostak and Bruce Betts on whether the extraterrestrial worlds in the Star Wars ...
Humans evolved from pigs, not apes!
On the subject of pigs, there is this story from the Weekly World News: