Blogging will continue to be a bit light as I am busy, am trying to get outside, and have Chas and Miss M coming tomorrow. But the world keeps producing the fascinating and the maddening...
Science fiction giant Arthur Clarke died this week. John Derbyshire has a good quirky remembrance of him here. I think he has Clarke down, as a writer and as a certain English "type" as well. I was a hopeless SF geek in my teens and can still read it-- Derb gets that too. He is too modest to mention here that Clark once wrote him a fan letter (he showed me a copy) but it may well be here or here somewhere...
SF to science. I have mentioned all- female species like Cnemidiphorus lizards before. Their reproduction is relatively straightforward, with all females giving birth to parthenogenetic clones, whether or not this puts them at an evolutionary disadvantage. But all male species? Believe it or not, there is at least one. The pure males mate with hybrid females: "These males "essentially represent a stable all-male lineage nested within an almost all-female lineage" " Bio geeks should RTWT. This blog, The World we Don't Live In, is excellent-- read it all. Thanks, Darren, for linking.
Darren has a new post up that combines science, speculation, raving lunacy (not his) and a 1984, tongue- in- cheek essay by John McLoughlin, who has appeared here in person so to speak. Did dinosaurs invent the atomic bomb? Who lies sleeping? Was H. P. Lovecraft a lizard? Says Darren: "John's 1984 article describes his contemplation of a new psychiatric disorder he recognises in himself: evolutionary bioparanoia. It is 'an acute, often immobilizing sense of dread generated by fatigue in persons interested in both the current state of world affairs and the evolutionary history of life on Earth'". Read and laugh- or shudder.
Doom. This gun control story can make any lover of freedom shudder: in Washington DC, as the Second Amendment's meaning is being debated before the Supreme Court, the police are going door to door through the city, asking if they may "voluntarily" search for guns . Voluntarily, right-- and I suppose that anybody who doesn't comply would NEVER go on any list. Seems like more than the Second Amendment is being violated here...
More animal related offenses and misunderstandings next post.
3 comments:
I can't find the name now, but there is a "species" of ant with genetically-separate male and female lineages; the workers are sterile hybrids.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-color-of-plants-on-other-worlds
I skimmed through this article tonight. Not only was the premise that vegetation on other worlds is likely to be non-green but the plan is to look for it. They have sensors they feel can id reflected light from the vegetation of other planets.
WH
I'm glad you liked it. :-)
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