Friday, February 20, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Think an ellipsis is when the moon moves in front of the sun?
Celebrate National Punctuation Day®
September 24
Personally.. i love punctuation snobs..
and so should you
I am going to have to put a link up to the "mis-applied" "quotes" "site" that i "found" one "day". ("soon".... i "promise")
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September 24
Personally.. i love punctuation snobs..
and so should you
I am going to have to put a link up to the "mis-applied" "quotes" "site" that i "found" one "day". ("soon".... i "promise")
Ancient Virus Gave Wasps Their Sting
Visit Here for the summary of the article...
adn here for the Abstract of the new paper...Genome Sequence of a Polydnavirus: Insights into Symbiotic Virus Evolution
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adn here for the Abstract of the new paper...Genome Sequence of a Polydnavirus: Insights into Symbiotic Virus Evolution
Monday, February 16, 2009
35 beautiful examples of animal photography...
(animals IN pictures... not taking them)
I know, i know, i could have infinitely increased my viewreadership by claiming that it was the latter rather than the former... :)
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I know, i know, i could have infinitely increased my viewreadership by claiming that it was the latter rather than the former... :)
Modern Human Variation: Distribution of Blood Types
"These patterns of ABO and Diego blood type distributions are not similar to those for skin color or other so-called "racial" traits. The implication is that the specific causes responsible for the distribution of human blood types have been different than those for other traits that have been commonly employed to categorize people into "races." Since it would be possible to divide up humanity into radically different groupings using blood typing instead of other genetically inherited traits such as skin color, we have more conclusive evidence that the commonly used typological model for understanding human variation is scientifically unsound."
If anyone BOUGHT this "book"... I am curious to hear if its true.
NOOOOOO one can fold a paper more than 7 or 8 times.... or so the story was... turns out this girl can do it...
The worlds still turning.
And why no one really cares about Mathsmaticians...

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The worlds still turning.
And why no one really cares about Mathsmaticians...

A quick witted cricket critic.
I saw Esau sitting on a seesaw. I saw Esau; he saw me.
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I, for 1 welcome our new Optomatic Overlords...
what do you think: why do we have the decimal system
in our western world? because of our 10 fingers? why
do we have 7 days a week? why are 60 seconds 1 minute
and 60 minutes 1 hour? why do we have 24 hours a day?
and 31 or 30 days a month? do you think thats a really
good solution? well, here is another one:
...welcome to octomatics !


Don't know what we had BEFORE? never fear...
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in our western world? because of our 10 fingers? why
do we have 7 days a week? why are 60 seconds 1 minute
and 60 minutes 1 hour? why do we have 24 hours a day?
and 31 or 30 days a month? do you think thats a really
good solution? well, here is another one:
...welcome to octomatics !


Don't know what we had BEFORE? never fear...
Friday, February 13, 2009
Gotta’ split; the time for action is coming soon.- January 29th 2008
Gotta’ split; the time for action is coming soon.- January 29th 2008
What is the banana plant? Surely a vegetable? It must be a fruit... It is, by strange point of fact a grass!! In many countries the banana is a staple of the local diet, as is for example the case in Uganda, just one example of many where a visitor will find people eating bananas in a delectable multitude of methods of preparation... from barbecued to mashed and used in a stew.
How important are bananas to the GLOBAL food supply? Well, the humble banana is actually the fourth most relied upon food crop, only trailing such heavy weights in human edible consumables category as maize, wheat, and rice. The banana we know today is very different from the banana that was available just several generations ago; this is not surprising when you know that there are thousands of varieties of bananas in existence. The “normal” type that we are used to seeing in our groceries and markets selling for an average of about thirty eight cents per pound is known as the Cavendish. This species replaced the Gros Michel, which was a susceptible to Panama Wilt disease, which was a fungal blight causing widespread destruction of banana crops, and eventually leading to unacceptable losses, forcing banana growers to move to growing the less flavourful Cavendish.
Bananas are a Colonious species. Much like the Europeans and their pseudo-successors the Americans, bananas spread their influence in a very similar manner.
The reproduction of bananas is a clonal process, they do not “reproduce” in the patriarchal euro-centric manner of Sexual reproduction, but instead by spreading runners, which will then asexually form into fully separate (but genetically identical) individuals. This throwback reproduction method and the case study of the banana should give us a lesson from Allah; a WARNING from the evolution of life, to the educated of today, about the prescient, and tragically under elucidated dangers of today’s “Green revolution”... a world where all of our foods are of one genotype... a world where as soon as there is any type of calamity, any blight, we are delivered to doom... In an empty breadbasket?
What about today? If bananas are so vital to so many of the World’s most at risk peoples, what are the dangers that face the people of today, who need to find a meal to eat tonight? Thanks in large part to such unjust, corrupt, and ethically corrupt corporations as United Fruit creating massive industrial farms where diseases are able to mutate, and evolve, becoming able to spread with the greatest of ease even to the non commercial varieties, there is very little hope for the banana being able to remain the staple food it currently is. The question to ask is not how much is that banana in the window, but what will we replace it with? I speak not for the affluent and over privileged west, for whom I am all but certain Monsanto will genetically engineer a super-banana with built in GMO pesticide (now with EXTRA cancer causing goodness) and all for a low, low cost... perhaps similar to sending men to the moon.
Who speaks for the poorest people in the world, those who subsist on the banana, and without which will fall into starvation extremely rapidly. For in today’s media saturated world, there is a Monsanto plug, or united fruit plug, an Arthur Anderson plug, a Chiquita plug (etc ad infinitum) played for us virtually daily. The reason we as humans are deficient today is because we allow ourselves to be bombarded by bombastic advertising, all convincing us that our over consumption and wastefulness is nothing but natural... all while we see perhaps one clip a month of an exotic locales, and 99 percent of the time in the context of “how violent, backwards, idiotic, or idiosyncratic” the culture in question “really” is.
When Hurricane Mitch blew through Honduras, in its wake was a trail of destruction, unemployment and eventually violence as a stunning 100 percent of the countries banana crops were wiped out. Further to this seventy five bridges out in total, making access by police and military all but impossible. This unemployment, in collaboration with the breakdown in civil services, led to a resurgence of “banditry”, perhaps one of the earliest boons for La Mara Salvatruca’s first ventures from El Salvador into Honduras.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
TED.
Amateur Professionals... Tomorrow's Creators, Tomorrow's Leaders.
In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.
--> Read more...
In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.
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