Monthly Archives: April 2008

Francisco Ayala Proflied in NYT

An evolutionary biologist and geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, he speaks often at universities, in churches, for social groups and elsewhere, usually in defense of the theory of evolution and against the arguments of creationism and its ideological cousin, intelligent design.Usually he preaches to the converted. But not always. …

Read the rest at: Roving Defender of Evolution …

Hans Reiser Convicted of First Degree Murder

Hans Reiser, who developed the Reiser File System, was convicted yesterday of First Degree Murder. He was accused of killing his wife, who’s body was never recovered.The Reiser Filesystem is thought to be one of the best journaling file systems available for Linux computers. However, since Reiser’s incarceration under suspicion of murder, the usual maintenance and development of the file system that may have otherwise occurred has not happened, so relatively few people have deployed it and major distributions tend to shun it as a default. Continue reading Hans Reiser Convicted of First Degree Murder

Florida House Academic”Freedom”Bill

The Florida House yesterday voted to require teachers to criticize evolution when teaching the subject in Florida public schools. The house version of the bill will now, most likely, travel back to the Senate (where a similar bill, was recently passed). Governor Charlie Crist is not talking about whether or not he will sign the bill.

“What this bill does is tell the teacher, go ahead and teach the theory of evolution and make sure your students have a complete view of that theory and they know that it is only a theory, it is not gospel law,” said Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla. “There’s no proof that any species has transitioned from one thing to another.”

You can read about it here, and add your comments to the news web site.

How To Escape Flashing Ad Annoyance

Maybe you have an ad blocker. There are reasons, though, to NOT use an ad blocker. One reason might be that they don’t work for you, for some reason. Another is that you use Windoze, and every now and then you have to totally wipe your hard drive and reinstall your system and all your software, and you get tired of re-configuring every stupid thing every time this happens and have fallen into the pattern of living with the defaults. Or, maybe, like me, none of those things are issues because you use Linux, but you still don’t blotto out the ads because as a responsible blogger you feel that you kind of need to see the ads. They are part of the landscape you work in. How can you effectively complain about something that you can’t see? So you live with the ads because you need to see what is showing up on your own blog, and because you don’t want to dampen your peripheral vision.For me, one thing this means is that if a page has really annoying behavior (usually, but not always, as part of the ads) I’ll avoid linking to it. If it has something I might want to blog about, but that is not too important, I just skip it. I try to not point my readers to sites that make noise when you open them, for instance. If I blocked the ads, I could not know to avoid certaiin sites.Still, there are these ads that are really annoying because they flash a lot. Like this ad here: Continue reading How To Escape Flashing Ad Annoyance

Cambrian Food Webs

i-bc4f9890e7ab4aeab604660e4845ff10-food_chain.jpgFood webs — the network of trophic (eating) interaction among the many species sharing a habitat or biome — is a much studied aspect of ecology. Food web and other similar phenomena such as dispersal syndromes are epiphenomena of evolution, resulting from the negotiation of competitive and cooperative interactions among many individuals. Indeed, the food web is the gross-level movement of energy within the ebb and flow of entropy and life-based energy capture. This flow of energy is fundamental to all life systems.ResearchBlogging.orgThe delicacy or vulnerability of a particular habitat … the potential susceptibility or resistance to perturbation … may depend on the details of this network of interactions. If everything ultimately depends on a basal food type that goes extinct, for example, there could be big trouble.So, just as understanding any aspect of life requires that we examine historically ancient, no longer extant systems, we need to understand ancient food webs. But, a valid study of food webs requires a certain level of detail that is often absent from the data available for ancient systems.Moments ago, a study of Cambrian food webs came out in PLoS Biology. Continue reading Cambrian Food Webs

Nature and Conservation News

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Canadian panel: Climate change is threat to polar bears from PhysOrg.com
(AP) — A scientific committee that advises Canada’s government on endangered species said Friday that climate change is a threat to the survival of the polar bear, but the species does not face extinction.
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Narwhals more at risk to Arctic warming than polar bears from PhysOrg.com
(AP) — The polar bear has become an icon of global warming vulnerability, but a new study found an Arctic mammal that may be even more at risk to climate change: the narwhal.
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Continue reading Nature and Conservation News