Third Instar

www.toothpastefordinner.com

Yet another interesting blurb from the collective at reddit science.  Biomimicry is explained through 15 examples.

a very worthy endeavor

An article in yesterday’s NYTimes makes the move not necessarily to equate, but to strongly link scientific pursuits with democracy. The author, David Overbye, suggests that the scientific tenet of questioning everything in order to get at “truth” mirrors or is an analog of free speech in a Utopian democracy. To what degree you buy into the proposition that scientists feel free to question everything I leave to you. I think they can be about as stubborn as anyone. Anyway, a short read, worth its time.

I had seven posts that I planned to make about things I found on teh webz. It’s the end of times the semester so what little free time I get I spend watching pirated television shows. Then my motherboard blew a few caps and I had to do a complete reinstall of Linux and lost the bookmarks. I’ll probably stumble across them again eventually but for now enjoy this comic:

Science is so cool in its own right I don’t know why anyone would prefer religious explanations. Dark flow is the latest dark phenomenon, and I wont pretend that I understand it at this point.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.
The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know.

The trouble with conceptualizing things like this is nicely described by Dawkins here.

Edit: I’ve uploaded a version to YouTube.

I’ve been dawdling on posts. I’ve also been putting together a small movie project for 7045. I pulled some footage from the Prelinger Archives and a few photos from the Creative Commons search on Flickr.

Sexual Selection (2:57) (35 MB xvid avi)

The little project sort of conflates the modern practice of sampling and the feel of the ephemeral educational films it draws on (bad editing, loud string music, etc.). The most difficult problem was that I had a certain set of ideas I had to address and finding relevant footage was hugely time consuming. So I had to compromise on my original plan, which was to pull in bunches of clips, settling for a few and using images for filler (eg. the section on natural selection.)

Here are a number of links pertaining to topics that relate to topics discussed in my rhetoric of science class today.

The UCMP’s wonderful introduction to the history of Evolutionary thought.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 – some color plates and other small bits of info.

Birds – An article on the ornithologist, John Gould’s silent disagreement with Darwin “When Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage, he recruited Gould to identify his bird specimens and to provide the bird illustrations for the Zoology of the voyage. It was Gould who identified Darwin’s Galapagos finches as separate species. . . . But his books nonetheless offer clear if unpolemical evidence of his dissent from Darwin, and his contemporaries had no trouble recognizing it.”

This happened just recently, and made me (again) want to move to England.