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 →

I ran over and made myself look big so that cars coming down the street would notice us and not run us over. He was now on his side convulsing heavily and continuously. His convulsing was causing his head and neck to whip around, so I got down and held his body in place so he would damage himself less. Two people who had walked out of a local store and did not see the accident came over and yelled at me.

“Leave him alone!” one of them screamed at me.

“He’s an epileptic! He’s just having an epileptic fit! Don’t treat him like he was sick or something.”

Read the rest at Quiche Moraine.

Amanda, who is pregnant, claims to have had no food aversions and she claims to have no food cravings. This makes me laugh.
Continue reading The Tabouli Craving →

Several inches of hail on the ground in Rice, Minnesota, June 27th 2009.

There’s a lot of philosophical discussion about what, precisely, constitutes a law or a theory in scientific practice. There’s also a lot of usage of the terms that has come to us over several centuries of not-quite-consistent application of terms.

Check out this interesting essay at The Austringer