Sunday, June 29, 2008

Sunday Links

A roundup of usual suspects, more, and worse...

Derb is on the evo beat-- the book he recommends sounds like a winner, and I have put it on my Wish List. But "Intelligent" Design shows no sign of going away-- the bill he opposes here just passed.

Are bananas about to disappear from our breakfast tables? A parable of our agricultural state...

Mrs P on the peculiarity (ahem) of our state seal.

LabRat of Atomic Nerds on things that things Stingray is not allowed to do. Gee-- sounds pretty normal to me...

When pigs fly: Australia liberalizes its gun laws.

This George Will column touches at least peripherally on something that occurred to me: will Keller, counterintuitively, mean that McCain gets FEWER votes because those motivated to vote for him solely to defend their right to bear arms now feel less urgency?

Is Thomas Jefferson resonsible for the ranchette epidemic?

Albanian virgin warrior women.

Is a "green" convention possible? I find this hilarious. As someone said, the greenest option would be to stay home and do it virtually. Like THAT would happen, with no ego gratification...

Small Polish farms devastated. Subsidies for Big Ag are evil.

Tibet's parasitic medicinal fungus is discovered, and suddenly everyone wants a piece, with predictable results for the environment. China of course plays a part. Luckily (though not much info is given here), American ingenuity seems to have figured out how to grow it "domestically".

A mountain lion eats a New Mexican, not too far from here. Though I worry more about them getting my dogs, I'll continue to go armed in lion country.

An unusual piece for the NYT: hunting hogs with pitbulls! (And no sign of disapproval.) HT Dr Hypercube, whose site has been so full of good things, from books to terraria, you should just go there immediately and follow all his links.

For fans of the American Museum of Natural History in New York (since my childhood not only my favorite museum but the Platonic ideal of a museum) comes this is a splendid link to photos of its history, including all manner of taxidermy, diorama building etc. (HT Brian at Laelaps.) Those interested in such subjects should also check out the latest issue (number 6 ) of the online magazine Antennae which is devoted to new "art" taxidermy. Antennae is a sort of avant- garde scholarly mag about animals, but less forbidding than that sounds. You can download it as a PDF, which is worthwhile for the fantastic images alone.

Bats get no respect, and many are in trouble. Carel Brest van Kempen blogs about them here.

Big changes in bird phylogeny coming after new studies. I can see the parrot- falcon connection but some of these are unexpected! I suspect I will be doing periodic updates. HT John Carlson at Prairie Ice.

Morer sooner I hope..

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is why objections to legalizing carry in national parks BOGGLE me. Granted, human predators are still the bigger danger there, but the logic seems to be... because it's wild land... it's safe?

WTF, over?

Matt Mullenix said...

LSU had a hand in the bird study.

Matt Mullenix said...

Several of these links didn't work for me Steve. Any clue?