A few years back now, I received a very appropriate gift from The Girlfriend’s Sprog, in the form of a ‘Bio Orb‘* – a self-sustaining aquarium containing bioluminescent dinoflagellates. These are nearly microscopic phytoplankton that, at night, glow briefly brilliant blue when
Category: Science & Evolution
Asking the right questions
Believe me, I’m well aware that I’m not posting much and then I come in with something like this. You’re right to feel offended. Not that I care at all, but I won’t deny you your affrontage.
So I was thinking earlier of the varying attitudes held when the subject of UFOs (or UAPs if you prefer, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) and extra-terrestrials and so on comes up.
Looking back on those we post in 2021
Okay, was that a particularly terrible title? I dunno, it had that certain cliché-trashing aspect to it…
Anyway, a look back at posts and photos from last year that I’m fond of, which you should definitely consider fair warning, because you’re not getting any others. There will be a couple more posts of a similar nature coming, one of them the annual tag roundup, so this will have
But how? Part 29: Selfishness
It’s been over a year since the last example of this topic, which is intended to answer the questions raised by a non-religious worldview, and it was making me suspect that I’d exhausted just about all of the possibilities, but new ones still pop up here and there. Today’s is kind of a multi-level one, because several aspects run together, so bear with me. I’ve also tackled
Here’s why, part 4: Alternative Medicine
In this ongoing series answering the question of why ‘mainstream science’ doesn’t take certain topics ‘seriously,’ we get to Alternative Medicine, or alt-med as it is often abbreviated. This term actually doesn’t have a firm definition, except for specifically being not something that a qualified physician would recommend (or alternately, would often
Too cool, part 49: Genetics and Human Evolution
Professor Ceiling Cat Emeritus (sometimes known as Dr. Jerry Coyne) over at Why Evolution Is True brought this one up, and normally I’d just send you over there for this, but it relates directly to a few posts that I’ve done in the past, so I went ahead an embedded it here.
Podcast: Nostalgia
Been meaning to get to this one for a while – just trying to find the right window. So here it is – completely unrelated to photography, arthropods, amphibians, and education. Let’s get all nostalgic now.
Walkabout podcast – Nostalgia
By the way, I speculated that this was the fourth for the year, which was way off, being half-again more advanced at sixth. Which doesn’t
Going critical
I’ve been considering this post for far too long now not whether or not it should be done, but the most effective approach to the topic, finally realizing that there is no one effective approach to anything. Additionally, the threat of playing pop psychologist was arising, something that already does a lot of damage, but then I realized that it couldn’t cause anywhere
Just so you know you missed them
In a few days at the end of the month, both the southern delta Aquariids and the alpha Capricornids (both meteor showers, and that’s apparently the way you should capitalize them) will be peaking, though I really should have told you about this earlier, because now the moon will be still a bit bright and visibility thus greatly reduced for all but the brightest meteors – both were ‘active’
New York: The… somethings…
It’s been a while getting to this point, because I had to shoot some video for it, which took even longer because I had to reshoot one of the clips when it turned out badly, and then of course all the editing and voiceover hoohah that goes along with it.
Anyway, what we’re talking about today are fossils. On the trip up to central New York last month, I got the chance to revisit a fossil