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Gun Rhetoric Baloney
The recent shooting in New York City exposes the empty rhetoric of concealed carry advocates. These scaredy-cats want to be able to carry a concealed weapon anywhere and their usual rhetoric is to...
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Got questions about evolution?
There must be lots of people out there on the interwebz with questions about evolution. People are evidently very interested, whether they are creationists, evolutionists*, or on the fence. When I...
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Catholics and Muslims want democracy - but for different reasons
So, what's wrong with Muslim countries, eh? That's something I hear with increasing frequency - usually by people who are implying some kind of cultural superiority over the faithful. After all, Muslim...
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Long-Suffering Snail Dads Carry Illegitimate Babies
If you can't find the snail in the photo above, it's because he's loaded down with thousands of cannibalistic babies—and most of them aren't even his. Dads in this marine species do all the...
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A bird picture
Over at the Nature Blogs Network, TPP hovers just at the margin of the top 5% out of the 2150 blogs they monitor traffic on. When you only consider plant blogs (flora), TPP is 8th. It's amazing how...
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Redescription of the Archosaur Parringtonia gracilis from the Middle Triassic...
Here is another redescription of another of the enigmatic archosauriforms from the Middle Triassic Manda Formation. This study confirms the affinity of Parringtonia gracilis and Erpetosuchus granti,...
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Typical journal spam...
Dear Dr. Rosemary, Greetings from Journal of Fungal Genomics & Biology. Based on your eminent contribution in the field of fungal genomics and biology, we are glad to invite you to submit...
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The Maxwell's equations, the Beatles and the differential geometry
posted by @ulaulaman about #Maxwell #physics #mathematics #music #Beatles The following video is a song about Maxwell's equations. Lyrics are written by David Olson with the basis of Let it be by...
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Lying with statistics
One of the most concise explanations of why your units of measurement matter, courtesy of XKCD:
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Around the Internet - 8/31
Publication A warning about the perils of preprint repositories. Statistical evidence that writing book chapters isn't worth the effort. (Though caveat: the author also doesn't find evidence of higher...
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Long time no posting. Sorry. I've been…
Long time no posting. Â Sorry. Â I've been working on our new CIHR grant proposal, but for unknown reasons not doing this on the blog. But I have a point I need to make in the proposal, and to a...
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You Don't Need to Purchase Articles for Outrageous Fees Anymore. You Can Now...
In putting together my last post I noticed something interesting (disturbing?) from the Cambridge Journals site. Â If you would like to purchase a PDF of the Parringtonia gracilis redescription paper I...
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Class dichotomies
Not sure what to make of this. Classes start next week and the two classes I am teaching have online moodle sites. Student access to both sites has been ~10 days ± 5 minutes. To date my senior/graduate...
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Driving through Issac
To meet old friends in KC this weekend, our trip took us across northern Missouri on Friday PM, and that meant we had to drive through the remanents of Issac. It rained, and rained hard. However the...
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KC's Fine Dining
KC, and TPP isn't sure which one, but there are two, is pretty much all there is between Chi-town and Denver, so it should come as no surprise that it has an ample supply of fine dining establishments....
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A New Turtle Dominated Fossil Biota from the Late Triassic (Norian) of Poland
This paper documents a newly discovered fauna from the Norian of Poland that is important because it is dominated by fossils of what is most likely a new taxon of turtle. Of course Late Triassic...
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How to Study: a Repost
This seems timely to repost. Since a new semester is about to begin I think a post on how to study would be apropos. So here is an advice column for students looking for some techniques to improve...
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Estimating replication rates in psychology
The Open Science Collaboration's interim report, which will come out shortly in Perspectives in Psychological Science, is available. We nearly pulled off the physics trick of having a paper where the...
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A Brain Explosion
Elliptical star coral Favia speciosa, photographed by Utsunomiya. For today's random taxon, I drew the Faviinae. This is a subfamily within the Faviidae, commonly known as 'brain corals' and recognised...
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Thieving Baby-Killer Bees Welcomed to the Family
Bee-related surprises are rarely good ones. But entomologists were delighted recently to discover five brand-new bee species in Africa. In another happy twist, these bees are thugs that break into...
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