Daily Archives: April 4, 2008

Quote

“I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.””Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”-Marie Curie

Mammals and the KT Event

A very important and truly wonderful paper in Nature described a tour-de-force analysis of the Mammalian Evolutionary Record, and draws the following two important conclusions:

  1. The diversification of the major groups of mammals occurred millions of years prior to the KT boundary event; and
  2. The further diversification of these groups into the modern pattern of mammalian diversity occurred millions of years later than the KT boundary event.

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Frank Gehry: From 1990, defending a vision for architecture

Speaking at TED in 1990, the not-yet-legendary architect Frank Gehry takes a whistlestop tour of his work to date, from his own Venice Beach house to the under-construction American Center in Paris. In this 50-minute slideshow (before TED’s 18-minute limit), Gehry explains the site-specific nature of his buildings — context he felt was lost in the discussions of his then-controversial work. In this candid and funny talk, he exposes his own messy creative process (“I take pieces and bits, and look at it, and struggle with it, and cut it away…”) and the way he struggles with problems (“This model on the left is pretty awful. I was ready to commit suicide when this was built … If any of you have ideas on it, please contact me. I don’t know what to do”).

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