Thinking of graduate school? Here’s some good advice about mentorship.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Thinking of graduate school? Here’s some good advice about mentorship.
A few carnival announcements:
The next Tangled Bank will be held next Wednesday at The Inoculated Mind (yes, it’s back up!). Send your submissions to karl AT inoculatedmind DOT com with “Tangled Bank Submission” in the subject line, or send it to me or host@tangledbank.net.
As always, carnival barking threads are also open threads—talk about what you will.
We had some rain overnight, and this morning the sidewalk on my way to work was swarming with earthworms and slugs. The slugs here in Minnesota are tiny little pathetic things, unlike the lovely behemoths I grew up with in Washington state, but they’re still cool to see. Anyway, Afarensis led me to this short photoessay about what happens when a hungry slug meets a worm. I am not surprised at all: I’ve seen a few cannibalistic slug feeding frenzies in my time. They’re like the slo-mo sharks of the damp undergrowth.
Oh, sure. They say it’s just a way to play videogames with your pet hamster or mouse, but I think it’s an exercise in training rodents in how to hunt down and kill us. The only thing saving us now is that they don’t know what to do with a health-pac or ammo or a BFG9000 when they find it on the floor.
A helpful reader has improved his killfile script—now you don’t need to edit it at all, and it puts a little “kill” link in each comment so you can easily take out annoying commenters with a click. Again, this requires Firefox with the Greasemonkey plugin, so you IE users and us Safari people are out of luck.
The true history of the world is told in the movies, so obviously what we need is a compilation of movie events to see what was really going on. It’s a work in progress, so there are a few gaps—the period between 1 zillion BC and 65,000,000 BC is a bit sparse on information—but more recent events are better covered. For instance, the year of my birth was quite busy:
1957 New Zealand – Lionel Pritchard and his girlfriend Paquita battle a horde of zombies (Braindead)
Camp Crystal Lake, New Jersey – Jason Voorhees drowns (Friday the 13th)
Michael Myers born (Hallowe’en)
Lana Turner meets Johnny Stompanato (L.A. Confidential, 1997)
The Iron Giant
October Sky
Zombies, supernatural mass murderers, and giant robots…oh, yeah, I remember that. The late 1950s were rife with alien invasions and mutant monsters, too. Lana Turner is a little out of place, until you realize it’s also the year my wife was born.
(via Eclecticism)
My pedipalps were slavering at the news of a symposium on spider sex to be held on the Catalan coast of Spain. Ah, if only I had a legitimate excuse (other than prurience) and a budget that could handle the expense…
Here’s what seems to be a relatively simple problem in evolution. Within the Drosophila genus (and in diverse insects in general), species have evolved patterned spots on their wings, which seem to be important in species-specific courtship. Gompel et al. have been exploring in depth one particular problem, illustrated below: how did a spot-free ancestral fly species acquire that distinctive dark patch near the front tip of the wing in Drosophila biarmipes? Their answer involves dissecting the molecular regulators of pattern in the fly wing, doing comparative sequence analyses and identifying the specific stretches of DNA involved in turning on the pigment pattern, and testing their models experimentally by expressing novel gene constructs in different species of flies.
You really must take a look at the Republican Party of Minnesota Permanent Platform. It’s full of interesting goodies.
There are 19 items in the section on civil rights: ten of them are various permutations of “NO ABORTION!”; two are against gun control; one is to protect people from being forced to join labor unions; one promotes the public display of the Ten Commandments; and one is a commendable condemnation of torture and slavery, but with an annoying qualifier.
Condemning religious, political and ethnic persecution in any country, specifically the
oppression, slave labor, torture and murder of religious believers.
I guess oppression, slave labor, torture and murder of the godless warrants only a “meh.”
There’s also the usual insistence that marriage is between a man and a woman only, there shouldn’t even be civil unions or any legal equivalent between same-sex couples, and a new one to me: they want a “Covenant Marriage” option…as if fundamentalists weren’t more prone to divorce than many of us others.
Here’s the one that really gets me, though.
Protecting educators from disciplinary action for including discussion of creation science, adopting science standards that acknowledge the scientific controversies pertaining to the theory of evolution.
There isn’t anything in there about improving science education, or even an acknowledgment of the importance of science; just this lame stance excusing bad teachers for peddling nonsense in the classroom. It’s official. It’s in the state party platform. Minnesota Republicans are creationists.
I’m hoping McClellan will be replaced by Tony Snow.
