Monthly Archives: July 2009

A true ghost story: The Slide Show

July 20, 2009Archaeology, Falsehoods and Skepticismghosts, Kimberley, McGregor Museum, South Africa, UncategorizedGreg Laden

The McGregor Museum is a complex building with several wings surrounding an inner court yard, a multi-layered roof, balconies everywhere, and numerous trees in the court yard close in to the building. So, a cat can spend the heat of the day in the shaded crown of a tree, and the cool of the evening up on the building’s sun-warmed metal roof.

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The interior of the McGregor museum houses numerious exhibits. The old period rooms and hallways focus on the late 19th century, and other newer areas (not shown) have an excellent set of exhibits on archaeology, human evolution, and “San” rock art.

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Defending Kimberly.

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The dude in the kilt.

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The Gatling Gun. (A Gatling gun is an old fashioned machine gun.)

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A visitor to the museum checking for ghosts.

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Doing fieldwork in a game park.

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Possible “San” burial … which turned out to have no physical remains.

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Although no artifacts of note or bones were found in the burial, there were plenty of these. The scorpions were in a state of torpor, as it was winter.

The End

Re-examining the cause of speciation and species diversity in the tropics

July 20, 2009UncategorizedUncategorizedGreg Laden

Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon?

Any time you’ve got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you’ve gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the kind of organisms, big rivers, high mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and so on can provide a habitat or a barrier, and when there is a barrier, populations may end up splitting across that barrier and diverging to become novel species.

The role of the big tropical rivers such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the role of rain forests, in certain actual speciation events is pretty clear, but the contribution of these potential barriers to overal species diversity and the general pattern of phylogeny in the wetter tropics is not well understood. This is because the kind of data needed to measure the effects of these potential barriers is hard to come by in these habitats.

A new study in PLoS looks at the role of past climate changes and sea level fluctuations in the rise of new species in the Amazon region.

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Continue reading Re-examining the cause of speciation and species diversity in the tropics →

A true ghost story: The Footnotes

July 19, 2009Uncategorizedghosts, Kimberley, McGregor Museum, South Africa, UncategorizedGreg Laden

As promised, the footnotes for A True Ghost Story.
Continue reading A true ghost story: The Footnotes →

A True Ghost Story Part 7: How I captured the Ghost of the McGregor Museum

July 19, 2009Uncategorizedghosts, Kimberley, McGregor Museum, South Africa, UncategorizedGreg Laden

… continued

Finally, without any further interruption …
Continue reading A True Ghost Story Part 7: How I captured the Ghost of the McGregor Museum →

Elwyn Tinklenberg: “I Endorse Bachmann for Congress”

July 19, 2009UncategorizedMichele BachmannGreg Laden

… Well, that is not really what the former Democratic opponent of Wackaloon Bachmann said, but he might as well have. As is being reported generally and nicely summarized on DMB, Tinklenberg, who will be running for Michele “The Congresswoman” Bachmann’s seat, has publicly announced that he will seek election even if he is not endorsed by the DFL.

Continue reading Elwyn Tinklenberg: “I Endorse Bachmann for Congress” →

Is Linux currently at a fundamental disadvantage owing to how computers are set up?

July 19, 2009UncategorizedUncategorizedGreg Laden

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A gingerbread computer can be complicated.
When you, Joe or Mary user, buy a computer at Best Buy or Computer Village or order a computer from Dell or Gateway, you get a computer with a system already installed. Do you think they had any trouble installing that system on that computer? Do you think that if Dell sells Mary a computer with Windows installed and they sell Joe a computer with Linux installed, that Dell had a differentially hard time installing one of those systems compared to the other?

Think about it.

Continue reading Is Linux currently at a fundamental disadvantage owing to how computers are set up? →

Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela

July 18, 2009UncategorizedUncategorizedGreg Laden

I will simply point you to my earlier post on this topic.

A True Ghost Story, Part 6: But first, since we’re talking geology …

July 18, 2009Uncategorizedghosts, Kimberley, McGregor Museum, South Africa, UncategorizedGreg Laden

… continued …

Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and you will not find it there.
Continue reading A True Ghost Story, Part 6: But first, since we’re talking geology … →

And That’s The Way it Was … Good Bye Walter Cronkite

July 18, 2009UncategorizedUncategorizedGreg Laden

Following almost exactly one month on earlier reports that he was gravely ill, which were followed, in turn, by denials of those reports, Walter Cronkite has died at the age of 92. And that’s the way it was.

My earlier post, and one story of Cronkite’s brush with Cronkite’s brush with racism and a strong Latina woman, is here.

The seductive siren of soft tissue preservation: Ancient dinosaur flesh wasn’t ancient. Or dinosaur flesh.

July 18, 2009PalaeontologyUncategorizedGreg Laden

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An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis I’m not mentioning any names, and don’t ask me any details. In fact, don’t repeat this story.

Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the activities of an ancient very pre-human hominid, is one of the oldest well dated, in situ objects of its kind known.

The stone had some yeck on it, and for giggles, this stone got passed on to a physicist who had invented a new way of looking at small things. He was going to look at the tool to see what the yeck was. I should point out that this physicist had no knowledge to speak of of either archaeology or geology.

Right away results came back clearly indicating that the yeck was made of apatite. Apatite is, of course, the primary mineral constituent of bone. Was this a piece of ancient bone jammed into the micro-bumpy surface of an ancient stone tool?
Continue reading The seductive siren of soft tissue preservation: Ancient dinosaur flesh wasn’t ancient. Or dinosaur flesh. →

The Family (The Book)

July 17, 2009UncategorizedBooksGreg Laden

I have too many books to read in too little time but I’m making a push. And I’ve just added to the list one entitled The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Yes, yes, I know, everyone else on the planet has already read this and knows about it and since the book was published a very very long time ago (late 2008?) it does not deserve to be discussed in the blogosphere.

But it is relevant as news because of the connection between various nefarious players who have done recent stupid stuff and the organization outlined in the book.

I’m especially looking foward to the author’s discussion of the 18th century preacher Johathan Edwards, which I understand to be absolutely scandalous and novel. Maybe too novel. Maybe not.

Most likely, though many of you have already read this book and have much more to say about it than I do, so please … do so.

Announcement: My new project.

July 17, 2009UncategorizedUncategorizedGreg Laden

Some time ago I announced that I was beginning on a new project. It is now time to tell you about it, and to ask for your help.
Continue reading Announcement: My new project. →

A True Ghost Story Part 5: The Grave on the Hill

July 17, 2009UncategorizedAfrica, Africa, Anthropology, Archaeology, ghosts, Kimberley, McGregor Museum, South AfricaGreg Laden

… continued …

One of the main reasons we were staying in Kimberley at all was to assist the museum staff with a particular, and rather singular, survey and excavation. The location and circumstances of this field project were quite remarkable.
Continue reading A True Ghost Story Part 5: The Grave on the Hill →

The Evolution of Cats: Sabertooth vs. Regular

July 17, 2009UncategorizedUncategorizedGreg Laden

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Sabertooth Cat, Megantereon nihowanensisl There are two kinds of “true cats.” Cat experts call one type feline or “modern” partly because they are the ones that did not go extinct. If you have a pet cat, it’s a modern/feine cat. This also includes the lions, tigers, leopards, etc. The other kind are called “sabercats” because this group includes the saber tooth. It is generally believed but not at all certain that these two groups of cats are different phylogenetic lineages (but that is an oversimplification).

It has been suggested for some time that the bite force mechanics for at least the most derived, latest (but, alas, still extinct) sabercats was less than modern cats. Specifically, this means that when the jaw and the maxilla are brought together by the major muscles that operate this system, the force of the bite is less in the sabercats. Another thing that has been suggested for some time is that among living (modern) cats, there is a fundamental difference in bite mechanics between the smaller cats (who have round heads) and the larger cats such as lions, who have squarer heads with more snouty faces.

Lion skull However, these assertions have not been as well tested because of a) a lack of live examples of sabercats to test the hypotheses on and b) lack of application of three dimensional morophometric modeling, which is the new thing in functional analysis of animal anatomical systems.

A recent paper, “Evolution of Skull and Mandible Shape in Cats (Carnivora: Felidae),” by Per Christiansen published in PLoS One gives us a new perspective on this. He has applied the morphometrics and come to some interesting conclusions regarding the evolution of bite force mechanics in cats.

This is pretty straight forward, so I’m going to bullet point it for you:

Continue reading The Evolution of Cats: Sabertooth vs. Regular →

Primitive beings walking on the moon

July 17, 2009UncategorizedAnthropology, Cosmos, Science EducationGreg Laden

This week we celebrate the anniversary of the first time human beings walked around on the moon, and as part of that celebration we find NASA releasing improved versions of the original scratchy black and white low resolution images of the first steps taken on the moon by Neil Armstrong. I’m worried that the youngsters out there do not understand the momentous nature of this event. So stand still for a minute while I force some wisdom on you.

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