The Online Journalism Review has an article based on interviews with several of us loudmouths here at scienceblogs.com, if you want yet another look at our perspective on this venture.
Not only do we learn where Tiktaalik came from, but we get an explanation for why the prayer study flopped!
Important efficacy tip: stash your porn in a lead-lined safe before praying.
No pictures yet, but isn’t this exciting? Half-billion year-old worm feces have been found in Sweden. Alert the tourism industry!
My own daughter, a participant in the blogospheric War on Easter…where did I go wrong right?
Connie Morris is the lead creationist kook on the Kansas state board of education. She recently took a tour of a middle school and was horrified at the depravity on display:
State Board of Education member Connie Morris took exception Wednesday to a picture of a made-up creature that satirizes the state’s new science standards hanging on a Stucky Middle School teacher’s door.
Fellow board member Sue Gamble told The Eagle that Morris asked for the picture to be removed.
It was a picture of…The Flying Spaghetti Monster!
You know, when word gets out that pictures of noodles and meatballs get Connie Morris all twitterpated, there is going to be a thousand of these blooming on school teachers doors now. Especially since, when Morris asked the principal to have it removed, the teacher was advised that a school board member had no jurisdiction on the matter…and the picture is still up.
John Lynch beat me to this story about catfish feeding on land, so I’ll be brief. It shows how the eel catfish, Channallabes apus, can manage to take an aquatic feeding structure and use it to capture terrestrial meals. Many fish rely on suction feeding: gape the mouth widely and drop the pharyngeal floor, and the resulting increase in volume of the oral cavity just sucks in whatever is in front of the animal. That doesn’t work well at all in the air, of course—try putting your face a few inches in front of a hamburger, inhale abruptly, and see how close you come to sucking in your meal. So how does an aquatically adapted feeder make the transition to eating on land?
A very cool idea: portray the Evolutionary Timeline on a web page, drawing it so that one pixel equals 30,000 years.
Go to the page and just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…
Pfeh. Who wants to be a superhero?
Let me know when there is a casting call for Who wants to be a supervillain?
Martin Brazeau is looking for volunteers to spend July in Atlantic Canada helping him split rocks, looking for Late Devonian to Early Carboniferous fossils. Let’s see…I wonder if the family would mind if I abandoned them for a month? I don’t have any important responsibilities, do I?
I received 45 submissions for this edition of The Carnival of the Liberals, and the carnival rules required me to select only a final ten. That was harsh; there were many excellent links sent in, and I struggled with the need to reject so many. Ultimately, I just had to let my own biases rule my decision, so if you sent in a submission and I didn’t use it, it’s nothing personal and it says nothing about a lack of quality in your work—it just means it didn’t fit my narrow criteria for what I wanted to read this time around. As you’ll see, I tend to promote godless secularism and grappling with real world issues in science, and so some fascinating and worthy articles on war and economics and labor just didn’t make the cut this time around.
