Fiona The Cuming Museum in Southwark is holding an exhibition entitled Mana: Ornament and Adornment From the Pacific. Polynesian decorative arts like tattooing and jewellery, which is like the confluence of all the things I love. Today is Commonwealth Day, and I’m off to Westminster Abbey to partake of the observance in the presence of Chuck … Read more
(I’m sure there’s a pun in there) Didn’t get a ticket to the Dawkins event next week at LSE (The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On) as it appears all of London was keen to go also. There’s a video hook-up, so I’ll queue for that if it doesn’t look too arduous. Melvin Bragg (who’s chairing … Read more
That the brain grows new cells, how it does it, and in what circumstances–that’s the topic of this piece at Seed Magazine, surveying the work of a number of neuroscientists. I found it really positive to read something so utterly focussed on the science, yet engaging and enthusiastic. I really loathe the mainstream journalistic need … Read more
It may possibly be an indictment of my happy geekitude that I get as excited about a new “Annual Review” as other people get about, say, swimsuit issues of magazines. Annual Review of Ecology & Systematics 2005 has papers on: Fluctuating asymmetry, the evolution of polyandry, model selection in phylogenetics, the evolution of cooperation, and … Read more
Why is it with all the combined mac-love and technogeekery amongst phylogeneticists there isn’t a simple, friendly way to get my treefile into a presentable graphical form? At present, it’s something torturous like from PAUP > Save As Pict. Then in Word, Import > Picture > File, and try to manipulate the individual bits. Until … Read more
I highly recommend Tze Ming Mok‘s Yellow Peril blog, commentating on multicultural life in Auckland, New Zealand. The other Kiwi blogs at the Public Address group are just as good, but hers makes me laugh and think (and realise why I hate and love Aotearoa) all the time.
In science, being “scooped” really sucks. It crossed my mind when I set up Culture Evolves! that “idea security” might become an issue. There are two aspects to this: 1. Idea Security as directly relates to the work I’m doing on my PhD, which I have yet to describe in any detail because I’m not … Read more
I finally updated my academic website. Updated CV with two publications 🙂 Changed old diary to point here. Updated the Links page to point to my del.icio.us bookmarks, as keeping that kind of thing current is a time-vortex best left unvisited. In the process, discovered that my site counter/stats tracker code was incorrect, and hasn’t … Read more
L’Oceanie: Peuples des eaux, gens des iles is a fabulous presentation of the geography, (pre)history, people and anthropology of the Pacific Ocean. It focuses mainly on the Eastern Pacific (i.e. New Guinea westwards). There are dozens of fabulous images and great animations. It’d be a terrific teaching tool for a first-year course and makes a … Read more
A review in PLoS Biology of Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour, an album that takes as inspiration and uses the sounds of modern food production. There are samples available in the downloads section of Herbert’s website.