…Mentally and socially, we begin our lives as tabula rasa, empty vessels waiting to be filled and develop our sense of selves based on the totality of interactions we have while developing. This then affects the way that we approach questions. As people we decide what to accept and what to discount based on how the information we receive incorporates into our accumulated experiences and understandings and the sorts of feedback that we have gotten on the way that we process information….

By Mike at Quiche Moraine. Please have a look.

… the botanical gardens in Cape Town:

see also this clock

I will be hosting Berry Go Round # 18, for July 31st 2009.

Please send me your submissions. Try to use the word “berry” or something in the subject line so I can find them! Berry Go Round is a blog carnival devoted to highlight recent posts from the blogosphere about any aspect of plant life.

… up and running at A DC Birding Blog. Please go and click all over the thing. Thank you very much.

Seriously, I’m not kidding.

Rebecca Skloot has ended up with a puppy (off the street) that is going to die unless it receives expensive medical treatment. Go here to find out the details and donate a buck or two via paypal.

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 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? →

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

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.

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. →



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 →

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….