At last, I’ve finally found it. The thing that will make the whole internet recoil and rethink this whole cat obsession. It’s Cats That Look Like Pinup Girls.
Warning: NSFW. Gratuitous nudity. Raging sexism. And cats. Lots of cats.
Well, my work is done.
I thought I’d break the news here first: I have incontrovertible evidence against human evolution. To wit: my lungs are persistently filling up with fluid over the last few days. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is pretty much the opposite of what they are allegedly evolved to do. I mean, what possible advantage could that have provided on the savanna? Aside from possibly repelling predators with weaker stomachs. Hear my mighty and productive coughs, o puny lion, and slink away revolted! Or something.
Why did we even bother to lose the gills, again?
This is becoming an annual tradition I’m not so sure I approve of: I was sick last year on my birthday as well. (Yes, today. 53. Thank you.) Last year Annette bought us a room in Tucson to celebrate, and we spent the day enjoying the city and eating lunch with friends, and then by the time we were halfway back to the Coachella Valley I was wracked with fever and hoping for truck stop soup.
I have to say, from the perspective of increasing age, that coughing fits aren’t nearly as fun as they used to be when I was a kid. And dextromethorphan is definitely becoming my least favorite recreational drug ever. Between this and PZ’s nosebleed, you all may want to cover your monitors with dental dams for the next few days. When do the Obamacare Death Panels kick in again? I’ll happily take my Socialist Suicide Pill if they cut it with some codeine.
Anyway, I do have a few interesting things to report that have accumulated over the last few days:
I think that last item means I’m gonna have to get over this goddamn cough the hard way.
Last spring, the All England Squid Fishing Championships took place, in which hundreds of fishermen strove to catch the largest squid. Unfortunately, the weather was not conducive to good fishing, and they caught nothing. Well, except for one person who discovered this cute little guy cling to his jig.
The winner!
This gives me hope. I’m going to sign up for a beauty contest right away.
[We are fortunate to have this transcript, taken by a company stenographer, from one of the early efforts of the resistance to instruct an army company in tactics. Although we now have more sophisticated technologies to hold these invaders in check, it is instructive too see how the American military in the 1950s struggled to cope with an unusual enemy, a struggle that was described in an excellent documentary produced by Warner Bros.]
Men — and ladies — the purpose of this briefing is to instruct you in the basic anatomy of the enemy. We have lost many soldiers to the assumption that these are just elephant sized beasts and that this is an exercise in big-game hunting; post-mortem analysis has found that many wounds that appear as if they should be instantly lethal actually miss major organs and allow the monsters to rampage on relatively unimpaired. I am here to shake up your assumptions and give you better targeting instruction so that you will more effectively kill the enemy.
Get this out of your heads right now. These are not overgrown familiar animals. These are giant ants.
Someone is appropriating my cunning strategems — everyone knows the way to get more hits on a blog is to talk about cephalopods.
It’s OK, though. I’m going to steal it.
Is this the time of year for metaphors about the old’uns fading away and new ones beginning?
(via Australian Geographic)
Biologist Carl Woese has died of pancreatic cancer at age 84:
Carl and his colleagues wrote two papers published in 1977 that overturned a universally held assumption about the basic structure of the tree of life. They reported that the microbes now known as Archaea were as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals are. Prior to this finding, scientists had grouped Archaea together with bacteria, and asserted that the tree of life had two main branches – the bacteria (which they called prokarya), and everything else (the eukarya). The new discovery added Archaea as a third main branch of the evolutionary family tree.
Woese was one of those guys who overturned a paradigm and became a founder of the succeeding paradigm. And he lived long enough to see the “dogma” he helped establish start to be undermined by new information, like recent suggestions that the common ancestor of all eukaryotes was likely Archaean, thus suggesting that having two main branches of life really does work as a model.
If there’s a better definition of success in a scientific career, I don’t know it.
…was, mostly, having houseguests. And falling behind on my writing, but in a good way. One of the perks of living next door to a National Park is that there’s an easy default option for entertaining friends who come to visit. It’s especially good if that National Park has climbable rocks to allow visiting kids to burn off a little energy.
It took some doing to get out of the house, though, because my guests were birders, and we’ve got some here.
Always make sure your houseguests have better camera equipment than you do.
I am actually staying home for several weeks, and it feels so good and relaxing. So this is kind of a self-portrait, I think.
(via)
