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Lotus flowering on Chinese time
Never stopped to think about it before, but the Phactors' lotus always starts flowering in July too, and apparently this is when they flower in China, and why not? While halfway around the world, it's...
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Join the HMS Beagle book club!
This is just great! The mapping voyage of the HMS Beagle was to last at least a year. This was the voyage of discovery that launched Charles Darwin's career in case you have never read about the...
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Unique bird pollination adaptation - poofty anthers
Here's a link to a newly published study describing and documenting a very unique bird pollination adaptation. The anthers have a "spongy" bulb of tissue and they are attractive to birds. When a bird...
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Useless research done here!
TPP must make a confession: in his long scientific career he has never studied a damned thing that was “useful” meaning studies that had immediately useful results for human problems. TPP's research...
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Barbarians and their enablers
You give a kid a BB gun, and sooner or later he'll shoot it at some windows. It's a given of human nature. You give rebels, terrorists, or even some other type of militia under limited central control...
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How to kill an iZombie
Sometime back TPP commented on iPhone zombies, but a similar affliction can also occur due to ear buds and whatever they are delivering from an iPod, so the result is an iZombie. Like all zombies, you...
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Weeds, weeds, weeds!
The Phactors don't want to talk about weeds; it's been a very bad year. Black nightshade, poke weed, wild lettuce, lambs quarter, and Oxalis (Not sure about the species, probably O. stricta; too busy...
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Bad news
Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry after reading or watching the news. There's the middle eastern living laboratory for demonstrating that tit-for-tat (or is it tit-for-TAT?) is always a...
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Great mid-summer flowering - bottle-brush buckeye
A native to south-eastern North America, the bottle-brush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora) is hard to beat for summer flowering. The Phactors have several growing as part of a semi-shady border, and they...
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That's one strange Thai temple
TPP has been to Thailand several times, and in the process traveled the country from top to bottom and side to side. Somehow TPP missed (?) this temple, Wat Rong Khun, a contemporary religious study in...
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Fundamentalists try to set those godless Unitarian-Universalist heathens...
In a total and absolute reversal of the golden rule, a group of fundamentalist Christians (they come in other flavors) invaded a UU church, well known to be a “Synagogue of Satan", during a service to...
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Parking spaces - bikes vs. cars
Our local municipality did a pretty neat thing. It constructed a big bicycle rack, one big enough for a dozen or so bikes and placed it in a parking space right in front of our favorite coffee shoppe....
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Cargo bikes in service
Why it was just 3 weeks ago that TPP did a blog about cargo bikes in Germany, and now here's an article about Whole Foods in Brooklyn NY delivering groceries by cargo bike. Where do they get those...
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Summer flowering woodland perennial - ramp
While woodlands are alive with spring flowers, there isn't much flowering going on in the forest understory during the summer. The reason for this is simple: there isn't much light and making fruit...
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Blog update
FYI. No domestic internet access for the past 3-4 days, and no time to sit around on hold waiting for the techies, and now the Phactors will be traveling at the end of the week, so expect another...
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Officially official retirement
TPP's academic alter ego retires - today, although there was a long, unpleasant discussion about that date with the university that eventually confirmed the faculty member could indeed retire on this...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Maackia
Since there won't be a new blog posted for a couple of days at least, here's a FFF a bit early. This is the first time this tree has flowered on our campus, a bit of a new addition, and it's sort of a...
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Turing's morphogenesis and the fingers' formation
by @ulaulaman http://t.co/9Q5rVkVzEc about #Turing #morphogenesis On today Science's issue it is published a paper about the application of Turing's morphogenesis to the formation of fingers. In this...
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Celebrating the 1939 Leo Szilard letter to FDR and setting the record straight
Leo Szilard was the principal architect of the famousletter to FDR. But even today Einstein's name is the onemost associated with the event. This needs to change(Image: NNSA).Today marks the 74th...
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Buongiorno
TPP has taken up a new residency for a month. Rent-a-mob, the inlaws, have already descended upon us. After two days of traffic, airports, airplanes, and in some cases, trains, some lost time, an epic...
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