Clik here to view.
Was that a big mistake?
TPP happened upon the Prairie Home Companion and Garrison Keillor was waxing philosophical about the beauty of writing a book. "So what are you doing this summer?" "Writing a book." It does sound so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
TMI Friday: A Cock gets bitten by a Pig
There is a certain kind of individual who dreams of retiring and opening a farm. The idea of escaping to the country, buying a small cottage and raising sheep and pigs. Oddly enough, many of these...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Friday Fabulous Flower - Deptford pink
Not all invasive, exotic plants, aliens, immigrants, are bad. The Deptford pink (Dianthus armeria) isn't a problem of any sort that TPP knows of and it makes itself quite at home in a prairie. It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Green world? Video of world's vegetation
Here's the link to an interesting video showing the distribution of terrestrial vegetation on Earth. Two things were rather striking. First, notice just how green vast portions of the Earth aren't....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gluten-free vodka - someone got some 'splainin' to do
Vodka is a pretty simple distilled spirit, ethanol and water, two colorless, tasteless, totally miscible liquids. It is true that fermented grains produce some aromatics that can be transferred during...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It's time to read The Origin of Species....again
I kind of lost the energy to keep up with my Origin of Species (OoS) book club, but I'm restarting it. In part this is to renew my writing here at AbC, but mostly it is to finish reading the OoS. So I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Regular churchgoers punish those who share their donuts
Anonymous games of reciprocity and trust are common devices used in the study of religion. Usually the games are set up so that, if you were ruthlessly logical, you shouldn't share anything. The fact...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dog and child abuse at art fair
The Phactors love art fairs, and so do lots of other people, which explains the usual congestion. These fairs are always conducted in the summer, in urban settings with asphalt and lots of brick, so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Things that go thump in the night
One of us is a light sleeper; the other sleeps like a near-dead log. So when something woke TPP, the thud of something falling, he got up to investigate. Otherwise the house was silent such that you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A trip to the aquarium
posted by @ulaulaman about #MediterraneanSea #Aquarium #Milano #ClimateChange Yesterday I gone to the Civic Aquarium of Milano. It was a very interesting tour, between aquariums and the reconstructed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Botanical Meeting - Early Planning
The annual botanical meetings are at the end of this month in New Orleans, the combined memberships of the Botanical Society of America, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the American...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Another humanoid species walked the earth
[I'm on vacation, and this short post will appear while I'm away.] One of the coolest scientific discoveries of the past few years was a small bone found in a remote region of Siberia. The scientists...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tomato wilt watch
The wilt watch is not going well. TPP started with 6 tomato plants, caged, in a row, and now three have been removed, and two of the remaining plants are wilting. So after a good start, the tomato...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Decapitated Worms Regrow Heads with Memories Still Inside
How good are you at remembering something you learned two weeks earlier? What if during the intervening 14 days, your head was removed? One flatworm isn't bothered by this scenario. After growing back...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How many hosta?
No this isn't really a quiz because someone would have to know the answer, and it isn't going to be TPP doing the counting. A long time ago someone planted quite a few hosta along about 60 feet of our...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Loaches
European spined loach Cobitis taenia, from here. The spined loaches of the Cobitidae are a family of small freshwater fishes found across Eurasia, with a single species (Cobitis maroccana) making it to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Smut! The name may be the problem.
A long time ago TPP and his friends got in trouble with the ex-Marine who was our high school assistant principal, i.e., disciplinarian. Not the brightest bulb, so after cracking down on profanity, we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Psychology holds the key to solving world’s problems
If you think hard, you'll realise the problem lies in people's thinking. Credit: Mutiara Karina (flickr) We have reached, in terms of technical solutions, if not a plateau, at least a point of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Surviving the Reader Apocalypse
And it came to pass that Google did speak from on high, and say unto them: "You know that whole Reader service that you've been using multiple times every day for the past several years? We've decided...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to run a university - two tech wrongs don't make things right
A new telephone arrived yesterday, one that uses voice over the internet, replacing a 30-yr old system, but the new instrument is twice the size of the old one. And it was sitting quite prominently...
View Article