Mucking out the stall

Anyone who’s ever dealt with livestock housed in a barn knows about the wicked unbalance of energy involved: it takes a lot more effort to remove the shit than it did to deposit it. This is an apt analogy for addressing theology.

Jerry Coyne and the various commenters at Why Evolution Is True had a read more

A saga long in the making

I was examining the progress of the spring revival in the yard yesterday and noticing that the deer had discovered my almond tree the previous night, which means it now sports a few less leaves than it did – this occurs every few weeks in the summer and seems to do the sapling no harm at all. And then I noticed a movement near the base of the reappearing dog fennel plants, and went in for read more

Earth Day suit

I am changing my tactics slightly with this post, in that I am announcing Earth Day early, so you can actually plan to do something or call in sick or whatever strikes your fancy. If you needed more warning than this, well, that’s your problem – get a decent calendar next year.

So tomorrow, get out and stomp up and down on our planet, just to remind to yourself how useful it is. Or if read more

Save yourselves!

That’s the punchline they should have used. I mean, how could you miss it?

The question, naturally, is where the chocolate bunnies fit into this.

Cyanide & Happiness is, as one might guess from the title (or the episode here,) a rather warped daily webcomic created by three artists – Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick, read more

Lest we forget

I’m not very big on tradition – in fact, I find it pointless, likely a peculiar artifact of our evolutionary past – but I savor the opportunity to repost this, so consider me a hypocrite if you like. Either way, take this little quiz yourself, or past it along to all those you know who want to pompously remind you of the True™ meaning of Easter. Or is it Eostre?

8. read more

Enjoying the weather


I got out to poke around down at the park a few times in the past couple of weeks, the same park that produced the great chorus frog recording last month. There was a primary reason for this, as I’ll get to shortly.

The image above I included mostly for the counterpoint to the tulip plant I featured previously. read more

Oh, now he sends it!


One (or perhaps eight) more from Jim, showing the progression of the eclipse, with two curious traits.

These were taken with a fixed camera, shooting with a wider field of view than the images from the earlier post. An intervalometer was used to snap a frame every 150 seconds, and the resulting eight frames were stacked read more

Aha, hmmmm

I decided to try and answer a couple of questions raised in the post about the newborn mantids, so I went out and collected the debris that was still hanging from the egg sac, that the newborns had been suspended from immediately after emergence. The first thing to become apparent was that it hung from a webbing read more

Had my back

I was aware of the total lunar eclipse scheduled to appear last night/this morning (there’s that stupid “it changed day in the middle of the night” thing again,) but after a week of clear and accommodating weather, the front pushed in yesterday and we received solid, low overcast skies, meaning the only thing I could see was how many places nearby waste electricity by throwing read more

Fish and reptiles and monkeys, oh my!

I have learned that part two of the aforementioned PBS series, this one titled Your Inner Reptile, will be airing Wednesday April 16 at 10 PM, on of course. Local listings may vary, but it does seem like they’re running this weekly.

You also haven’t missed out if you didn’t get the chance to see Your Inner Fish, the first part – it can be viewed directly on PBS’s read more

1 259 260 261 262 263 330