Via Savage Minds, who have reproduced the article from the Dominion. Gavin Menzies (author of a book called 1421: The Year China Discovered The World–which I have not read) claims all sorts of interesting selective stuff about Chinese exploration of the Pacific (transcript of a speech, here) and most mindbogglingly, that the Maori were not … Read more
Doolittle, W.F. (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science, 284, 2124-2128. [link] Interesting review discussing recent findings which question a strict tree model for the universal tree of life. Lateral gene transfer is non-trivial, especial in archaeal and bacterial genomes. Doesn't dismiss the usefulness of molecular phylogenetics as a tool, but questions it as … Read more
A nifty set of philosophical and moral thought experiments from the Beeb.
Geoffrey Miller writes in SEED Magazine about Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them … Read more
Via Anthropology.net, Dance, Monkeys, Dance, a wonderful little clip on being a human. Monkey. The dedication is to Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams, and you. By Ernest Cline.
A terrible sign of laziness, but the two things I want to blog about require brain power and I just can't get that together this afternoon. From Language Log, Reliable Sources on (Language) Classification. A USB flash-stick that balloons up with the amount of data stored on it. From the ever-awesome John Hawks, the unintended … Read more
From the delightful ladies at InkyCircus, big pictures of bugs! They have such personality at this scale, I don't know why people are scared of critters. Except ants, of course. That degree of organisation in something with three ganglia is scary.
The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event Behar, D. M.; Metspalu, E.; Kivisild, T.; Achilli, A.; Hadid, Y.; Tzur, S.; Pereira, L.; Amorim, A.; Quintana-Murci, L.; Majamaa, K. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN GENETICS VOL 78; NUMB 3 (2006) pp. 487-497 Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme … Read more
The wacky kids at the University of Manchester present the Jodcast, a podcast from Jodrell Bank Observatory. Stars! Space! Stuff! In case you've been living under a rock, the Astronomy Picture of the Day is still one of the coolest things ever. Am still bitter about Pluto.
(Everything is funnier when you reference the Ultimate Showdown) The Guardian technology blog links to EB’s response to the claims by that journal that EB was no more accurate than Wikipedia. The 20-page EB response is an exercise in the most miffed sort of quibbling, especially the appendix where they address the reviewers point by … Read more