I’m still going on The eye: a natural history, but right now I’m going to talk about Richard Feynman’s autobiography, Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman! (I must confess that I’m one of those people who keeps several books on the go at once – The eye is on the bedside table, but Feynman’s book is what I read […]
Continue readingYear: 2008
it’s different at uni
I know that if you’ve finished, or have almost finished, your NCEA exams, probably the last thing you are thinking about is university study! More likely, a relaxing break is foremost in your mind 🙂 (Mine too, actually…) But I was talking this morning with colleagues about how different university is from school for many […]
Continue readingtwo-headed kitties & embryonic development
A few posts back Heraclides referred to a kitten born with two heads – you may well have seen it on TV news the other night. (If you google ‘two-headed kitten’ you’ll find this wasn’t a unique birth. I remember we had a two-headed calf in the zoology museum at Massey, when I was a […]
Continue readingwhy don’t big dogs live so long?
Yesterday, for the first time in more than 14 years, I went for a long walk by the river without my dog Bella. These days she’s still keen to go for a walk – but it’s more like an amble. A v-e-r-y s-l-o-w amble. And after 2-3 km that’s it for the day. Her age […]
Continue readinglazy sunday
I feel lazy today. I could review a paper for you… Or – I could share something completely off-topic!
Continue readinganimal communication
I was sorting some papers today & came across some notes I wrote for a lecture about animal communication. And I thought they’d make a good subject for a blog.
Continue readingthe natural history of the eye
Well, here I am back in the office again. The conference was great – but it was on assessment in the tertiary education system: not something you want to hear about here 🙂 But during a break in the proceedings I slipped out & investigated the Lambton Quay bookshops… (Dangerous things, bookshops; I could easily […]
Continue readingthe beauty of biscuits…
… sea biscuits, that is – what we call sand dollars. PZ has just posted a video clip of the early development of sand dollars, & it’s absolutely gorgeous. It starts, as he says, with a bit of echinoderm porn – I never knew that sand dollar sperm looks like that whipped ‘cream’ stuff that […]
Continue readinghuman-chimp similarities – evolution? or design?
(Another link-&-comment today – I’m at a conference & a bit short of time for longer posts.) The Sensuous Curmudgeon offers a dry commentary on a web-post by the Discovery Institute oops Institute for Creation Research (thanks to the Curmudgeon). The DI post is itself a commentary on a recent research paper looking at the […]
Continue readingdo you go ‘wow!’ at big numbers?
Quite probably – even though it’s quite hard to envisage what a really really big number means. But people can also be swayed by big numbers when they shouldn’t be. Ben Goldacre gives an example in his latest post. A media story about a particular statin (a drug used to lower the levels of ‘bad’ […]
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