It turns out that the Florida couple that was murdered last week were killed as the result of a safe-cracking job gone bad. The safe was taken from the home. Seven bad guys were arrested, and found to have a very large stash of weapons.

Who has a safe full of stuff worth a home invasion and multiple murder to get? Is this something from a film that spilled over into real life?

source

UPDATE: This is very funny. I was just watching MSNBC and I think I figured something out. It was teh safe itself, not the contents, that the arrested bad guys were after. Maybe an antique, maybe historically significant.

But, I’ll add this: Whatever the explanation is, it is quirky. Strange. Unexpected.

Too bad the interviewer on MSNBC was not thinking on her feet … she could have responded to the clues the Sheriff was giving her….

The part of the hearings that directly question Sotomayor is over.

I watched (substantial parts of) several supreme court justice confirmation hearings. Bork. Thomas. Souter. Roberts. Others. Sotomayor was measurable, palpably, superior to all the others in her intelligence, ability to frame answers so they could be understood, all of it.

The Republicans all looked like morons.

Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I’m not sure when this lemur went extinct, but I think it was not long before Franz found the fossil.

The bones found in 1899 as well as other material have been sitting in an Austrian museum since.

Continue reading Extinct Lemur Brought Back to Life. Virtually. →

… and it’s a good one … is HERE. Go read it, click on all the links, then stubleupon or digg or whatever each of them several times!!!!!!

Plants and their herbivores have an interesting and complex relationship. It has been true for quite some time (many tens of millions of years) that terrestrial plants do not move around while animal herbivores do (though I’ve got friends from Texas who claim that there is a Texan tree that will move from one side of your yard to the other if it is pleased to do so). Generally speaking, a plant can not avoid being consumed by the herbivores by running away. So, it must have a defensive strategy or two that work in situ, and most likely these strategies evolved in relation to the also-evolving strategies of the mobile herbivores. The complex interconnected dynamics of herbivore-plant co-evolution provides much of the fabric for the ecology of any given terrestrial biome.
Continue reading The Poison in the Leaf: Macro Evolutionary Patterns in Plant-Herbivore Co-Evolution →