Business columnist John Brandt, using "Neanderthal Inc." as a stand-in for your typical stupid corporation:
Listen up: I've been CEO of Neanderthal Inc. for a lot of years, and if I've learned one thing, it's that if our employees were smart enough to be trained, they sure as hell wouldn't work here.
Daniel Drezner, commenting on why suburbs mark the top ten places to live for "families with children":
At this point in the 21st century, having small children is kind of like belonging to a different religious persuasion that others view as bizarre and discomfiting. It's nice to be with one's own kind during these years.
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 Manchester researcher Andrew Boulton and colleagues:
"Maggots are the world's smallest surgeons. In fact they are better than surgeons - they are much cheaper and work 24 hours a day," Professor Boulton jokingly said.
And then this stomach-turning idea:
"There is no reason this cannot be applied to many other areas of the body, except perhaps a large abdominal wound."
Uggh!
From a Carl Zimmer story about the incredibly long phalluses of certain ducks:
Gazing at the enormous organs, [Patricia Brennan] asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.
"So what does the female look like?" she said. "Obviously you can't have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car."
There's this quiz from USA Weekend -- that Sunday newspaper insert magazine:
What's hotter these days than cavemen and fifth-graders? Geico has hit a home run with its cavemen ads, and the hilariously testy portrayal of early man is now in pilot development for an ABC sitcom. And the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" is one of the top new series of the season, airing Thursdays through May 10.
Both pop-culture sensations work well for the very same reason: We watch with the assumption that we have an intellectual edge over the subjects. But in the end, it's the cavemen and the fifth-graders who demonstrate that they're the ones with the real smarts. So we at USA WEEKEND Magazine thought we'd present a fun quiz that combines the two: "Are You Smarter Than a 5th-Grade Caveman?"
I have nothing more to say. Other than, some paleoanthropologists have been passing this around on e-mail today, and none of us seem to be able to come up with the right answers. Which I suppose is a bad sign. For somebody.
JOHN: Now, that's a frightening headline.
GRETCHEN: What's that?
JOHN: Regrown arms just around the corner?
GRETCHEN: Whoa, yeah!
JOHN: Can you imagine, just walking around the corner, and, hey, there they are waving at you?
GRETCHEN: I want one growing out of my chest!
Savage Minds poster Thomas Strong, in reference to blogging:
Melanesians not infrequently associate concealment with growth. As with the child in the womb, or the sweet potato in the garden, or the young woman before her debut, one way to achieve growth is to contrive its concealment.
Joel Allen (1877:139), quoted in Virginie Millien and colleagues (2006):
The present more or less unstable condition of the circumstances surrounding organic beings, together with the known mutations of climate our planet has undergone in past geological ages, points clearly to the agency of physical conditions as one of the chief factors in the evolution of new forms of life.
Allen JA. 1877. The influence of physical conditions in the genesis of species. Radical Review 1:108-140.
Millien V, Lyons SK, Olson L, Smith FA, Wilson AB, Yom-Tov Y. 2006. Ecotypic variation in the context of global climate change: revisiting the rules. Ecology Letters 9:853-869. doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2006.00928.x
Erik Trinkaus, quoted by the BBC on the Tianyuan skeleton:
Sex happens. I find this neither disturbing nor surprising.
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:
Porn is a tough sell for bashful panda
But Thai zookeepers keep showing videos, hoping he’ll get in mating mood
Apparently, pandas do not respond to television.
