With this entry I thee wed tie with 2011 for number of posts made in a year, and everything past this will be bonus content. Or something. It’s nonsense, really – I just vowed to try and do more posts, vaguely motivated by those who can apparently do seven a day (not looking in Jerry Coyne’s direction when I say this, no no.) But
Category: Continued from other blogs
You can call me Al
Over at the New York Times, Carl Zimmer has an article on the difficulties of pinning down hominid species, which illustrates an interesting perspective in biology, but is unfortunately a little too brief. There are a couple of factors at play, and no easy way to resolve them.
The very first thing to bear in mind is that ‘species’ is an arbitrary distinction in many ways. The word was
Isn’t that the real truth?
Just in case anyone hasn’t seen this subject the last nine times I approached it, I find ‘free will‘ to be a corrupt concept, a common belief without rational support (which gives it plenty of company.) And no, I’m not going to broach it again. Instead, we’ll look deeper into the question of whether we should retain some illusions.
Buried at the crossroads
Heads up!
On Friday, September 6th, at 11:27 PM EDT, NASA will be launching the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) satellite from the Wallops Island launch facility on the Virginia peninsula. Viewers on the east coast of the US may be able to see it as it heads towards lunar orbit, since night launches allow the exhaust plume to be seen from great distances.
You go, Randall
xkcd is great today:
Ophrys apifera.
Yes, I read xkcd before Why Evolution Is True, but the latter has more detail on the whole subject.
Couldn’t hurt
At roughly 8 pm tonight (or I guess I should say August 31st, since this will undoubtedly post the next day,) The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog mentioned a campaign where a vaccine is donated to a child in an underdeveloped country for every comment made on participating blogs. Known as the Shot@Life campaign, they feature a different post every day for a month, from different bloggers.
Which
A whooshing noise high overhead
Following links just now, I began reading a post on what Vanessa Williams discovered about her DNA. The money quote:
My DNA breaks down as follows: I’m 23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% Togo, 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese.
Now, I can’t wait to go to Ghana and Cameroon and Togo and Senegal — it’s a great opportunity
Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure
Despite the fact that, just this past weekend (as I type the first draft anyway,) friends of mine have made disparaging comments about debates that take place on the Intersnarl, I return once again to the fabled Fountain of Free Will, a topic sure never to die because philosophy has taught us nothing if not how to continually fail to “get it.”
This time around it’s a post on Why
The dude is hot. Or cold. So, so cold…
A few years back when I was still following the Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait posted an image of odd geological features on Mars, along