Designer Jessi Arrington packed nothing for TED but 7 pairs of undies, buying the rest of her clothes in thrift stores around LA. It’s a meditation on conscious consumption — wrapped in a rainbow of color and creativity.
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So, what’s this about killing a wolf at the Minnesota Zoo?
The Minnesota Zoo has been involved in a Mexican Gray Wolf breeding and reintroduction program for some time now. Last I checked, it was not going well …. they were not having mush success in getting the wolves to produce offspring. I think they had some puppies in 2003, but I’m not sure of their status. The problem with at least some of their wolves is that they were born and raised in captivity. The “cultural” side of the reproductive process had been pruned from their lineage, so they kinda-sorta did things vaguely related to wolf-sex but that wasn’t enough.
Anyway, yesterday one of the wolves nosed its way through the fence of its enclosure, jumped over another fence and started prancing around among the visitors, so the zookeepers shot it to death. They say that tranquilizers were not an option. Apparently there were no other options either.
I’m not blaming the zoo for anything here, and in fact I’m not making any specific statements about anything …. just asking the question: Has the zoo’s role in reintroduction and survival of this small population of wolves been on balance positive, neutral, or negative? That question can’t easily be asked in terms of education. I’d be willing to bet that at the level of public education the zoo has had a very positive impact. I’m asking, specifically, about simple numbers. How many wolves have been in the zoo, how many have been released, that sort of thing.
A secondary question might be this: Shouldn’t there be a better strategy for dealing with an escaped wolf?
Continue reading So, what’s this about killing a wolf at the Minnesota Zoo?
Water Water Everywhere but ….
Don’t forget to include Global Water Dances on your calendar. That date would be June 25th, 2011. For those of you in the Twin Cities, it is happening at the Stone Arch Bridge. There are about fifty locations world wide. Find your nearest event here.
And now, your depressing yet important water fact for the day: Bad water kills 1.4 million children every year.*
Videos of the Global Water Dances project:
Continue reading Water Water Everywhere but ….
Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken
Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He’s found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he’s taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a “Chickenosaurus”.
Continue reading Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken
Ed Brayton on Atheist Talk
Ed Brayton, known to many of you as the Dispatches from the Culture Wars blogger, as well as co-founder of Michigan Citizens for Science and The Panda’s Thumb, will be on Atheist Talk Radio this coming Sunday. Mike Haubrich, Ed and I will chat about the very current, often disturbing, and occasionally entertaining subject of Crazy Preachers. Like Harold Camping for example. We may also touch on other currently in the news individuals who don’t happen to be preachers. Perhaps we’ll ring some bells and warn some Brits!
Details are here. I hope you can join us.
Here’s Ed on Rachel Maddow, just for fun:
If we’re ever going to get out of here alive, we’re going to need some golf shoes.
I have four or five things for you.
Continue reading If we’re ever going to get out of here alive, we’re going to need some golf shoes.
Housing Project Discovered on Mars
It could be a power station, or a biological containment, or a garage or even a weapon. Or, it could be ….
Continue reading Housing Project Discovered on Mars
PZ Myers in Action on The Street
Context, details and discussion are here: PZ MYERS VS ISLAMISTS ON EMBRYOLOGY
Why does Sarah Palin hate the truth? And why does she hate America?
I’m not sure why colonial Americans thought they could succeed at blowing off the British to make their own country or countries, but that they needed to do something was obvious to a lot of people during the middle of the 18th century. In the end, it would turn out that the American Revolution was a little like a lot of other things that have happened in history (and prehistory): Very unlikely to have come out the way it did, because at so many junctures something quirky or unlikely happened, and shaped the course of events significantly. It might have been inevitable that the British living in the Americas would try out the whole Revolution thing, but once it got going there was no reason to expect it to work, and in fact it failed badly at many points. Many of the most important successes that would eventually be strung together in the post-hoc narrative we now tell as our country’s origin story were actually very lucky breaks.
Continue reading Why does Sarah Palin hate the truth? And why does she hate America?
Sacrifice on the Serengeti
Life History, Genetic Relatedness, and the Evolution of Menopause
Imagine you’re on the Serengeti Plateau and your children are hungry. For miles in every direction there’s nothing but dry scrub grass with the occasional flat-topped acacia tree marking the landscape. Your oldest has found a spot to dig for tubers but he and your daughter aren’t strong enough to scrape away the hard, baked earth by themselves. Your husband is tracking a wounded gazelle and could be gone for days. Meanwhile, the infant slung to your hip has started screaming and the distinctive sound triggers a release of oxytocin that causes your breasts to swell and leak. You have to feed her but you can’t do that and make sure your other children get enough to eat. There’s a very real chance that some of them will be too weak to survive the next time fever breaks out unless you can get help.
Read this excellent review here.
That’s a guest post on Carin Bondar’s blog written by Eric Michael Johnson. If you like the post you can vote for it in the Quark Award … Just go here and search for ‘Dr. Carin Bondar” and vote for that article (which is actually by Eric Michael Johnson)
Changing authorship on a blog is a pain, and is often impossible, thus the confusion in authorship.
How To Be a Rational Being
Don’t forget to tune in to Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio on Sunday AM (click the link for details) to hear Desiree Schell and I settle whatever differences we may have on how to BE A SKEPTIC!!! I warn you, this could be gruesome. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Office of Homeland Security have set up checkpoints on the border. Listen in, call in, email in.
Darwin’s Lost World Free Chapter
As you know, the NCSE brokers free chapters and sometimes entire books for people to download and read, in order to disseminate knowledge about Important Stuff. They just released a chapter of Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life
The Rap Guide to Evolution
A hip-hop exploration of modern evolutionary biology, with songs about Sexual Selection, Artificial Selection, Altruism, Morality, and Unity of Common Descent.
Louis Agassiz + Alexander Agassiz + Charles Darwin + Coral Reefs = High Entertainment and Science!
There are many fascinating stories linked to the early days of evolutionary biology and geology, and more than one of them is intertwined with our understanding of coral reefs. I had always thought that Darwin’s interaction with the question of how coral reefs form was central to Darwin’s own formation as a scientist, in part because of Charles Lyell. Lyell was the Big Kahuna of geology and earth science of the day, and had more or less established the standing theory of how coral reefs formed. Darwin, on observing reefs “in the wild” very quickly realized that Lyell was mostly wrong, and proceeded to develop his own models for reef formation. But Darwin was timid, intimidated even, in the light of Lyell’s monumental stature in the field. This, I think, caused Darwin to use a multi-faceted approach to documenting his ideas and developing his models
What could have been a major showdown between Lyell and Darwin turned out much differently. By the time Darwin had returned from The Voyage
But there was conflict, and the conflict continued for decades and indirectly or directly engaged everybody who was anybody in the field at the time. David Dobbs writes:
Today the main argument about coral reefs is how to save them. But in the 1800s, the question of how coral reefs arose, known as the “coral reef problem,” ranked second only to the “the species question” in ferocity. In many ways it reprised the evolutionary debate, engaging many of the same people and ideas. It provided both an overture and a long coda to the fight over Darwinism. The coral reef problem did not concern the origin of species or humankind’s descent. Yet it reiterated the evolutionary debate’s vexing questions about the importance of evidence, the proper construction of theory, and the reliability of powerful abstractions.
Brown Recluse Spider Warnings!!!11!!
It is Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This means that US citizens and I’d bet some Canadians will be receiving the annual Brown Recluse Spider Warnings via Email.
Continue reading Brown Recluse Spider Warnings!!!11!!