Are you adopted or from India?
I have a friend who wants to know about her birthmother and family in India, and is seriously considering going to India to check into her own background. I assume she is not the first person who was born in India, adopted by a US family and then got interested in her own past. If you have experience or knowledge in this area, could you help her? I would appreciate that.
You can’t link weather to climate change, right?
Wrong. Of course you can. You can even link specific weather events to climate change if you are willing to adapt the way your brain works to match reality more than most people do. But the specific question of “extreme events” in relation to climate change is not only tricky, but subject to analysis, because it is all really just a matter of how numbers work, statistically. And, a current paper in PNAS manages to do a good job at linking weather and climate. The paper is here and a writeup at RealClimate is here.
Dmanisi … is it a different kind of hominid or what?
Here’s a blog post discussing tooth wear and diet from Dmanisi. I haven’t written much about Dmanisi other than to note that Julia has been hanging out there (did field work this summer). Someday I will. For now, read that blog post by Lawn Chair and then consider the difference between the Australopith diet and the essential Homo erectus diet. (Those last two links go to PDF files)
Other Matters
Mike has some nice pictures of Cheetahs.
This is the funniest comment on the internet ever.
And yes, LeRoy Bell, my nephew, made it through the latest cut on the XFactor!
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
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RE: Funniest comment on the inner tubes :-
Around 1620 there were three famous Francis Bacon’s alive simultaneously. The judge, the MP for Ipswich, and the statesman.
Maybe the commenter was just asking which one made the quote, but no-one understood that he was asking a question, Greg? 😉
I asked my wife who works with someone from India if there is some sort of cultural restriction about mothers showing grief for a deceased or adopted child. She told me that it depends entirely on the region/cultural practices of wherever her mother is/was from. Apparently (and unsurprisingly) westerners tend to treat India as a whole and it’s impossible to ascribe any cultural practice to all Indians.
Very true. The region in question here is around Trivandrum, the western side in the south.