Friday arachnid blogging; or, nomen non est omen

This intermittent series of Friday arachnids has not gone over to an all-crab-spider format, I promise you. It's sheer coincidence that this is the third crab spider in a row. Ah well, she is at least a Philodromid rather than a Thomisid--a spider from the genus Tibellus. At first glance, though, you might not think her a crab spider at all:

She hasn't the typical crab-spider habitus at all (though the shape of her prosoma is very crab-spiderish). In fact what she really resembles, at first glance, is a kind of spider known as Tetragnatha. Now, there's a bit of controversy over where to place the Tetragnathids, systematically speaking; but all the possible places for them can be described as 'not close to the crab spiders'. Yet Tibellus looks like a Tetragnathid, and even acts like one: if you see her in the wild, it will likely be in her characteristic pose, stretched out along a blade of grass.

(A closer glance, of course, and the resemblance begins to dissipate. Most obviously, Tibellus has the tiny 'jaws' (chelicerae) typical of crab spiders. Tetragnatha, by contrast, has enormous hinged jaws that give the family its name ('four jaws'). And Tetragnathids, unlike crab spiders, build webs. (One genus within the family, however--Pachygnatha; stockier beasts than Tetragnatha--gives up web-building when it becomes an adult, going instead on the hunt, like Tibellus).

I found this Tibellus in the wild, but not in her usual stomping-grounds. She was stowed away on a ferry from Formentera to Eivissa. If you look very carefully in the photo, you might see a pair of black dots at the back end of her abdomen. This marks her as Tibellus oblongus. Had the black dots extended in two parallel rows all along her abdomen, she'd have been Tibellus maritimus--and wouldn't that have been so much more appropriate?

Friday arachnid blogging, with the sexy bits left out

Last Friday's spider, Xysticus, was of plain if pleasing appearance. This week, let's have a look at her more glamourous cousin, Thomisus onustus, whose genus gives the family Thomisidae its name:

Our spider is brilliant yellow, but the species comes in a broad run of bright colours. Some are white with yellow or pink stripes. Some have a prosoma (head/thorax) and legs of deep, nearly blackish purple, and a pink abdomen dappled with white flecks.

It's what I can't show you that makes me sorry. What makes me even sorrier is that I didn't get to see it myself. I found this spider on a flower (where else?) outside Sant Ferran on Formentera. It was a very windy day; stormy, really. On the next flower over was another T. onustus: the darker, much smaller male.

It would be a treat to watch him court the female. Many of the Thomisid crab spiders, you should know, have a taste for S&M.; Before mating, the male binds the female to their flower-bed with cords of silk. Would T. onustus do the same?

This bondage is all play-acting, by the way; when the male is finished, the female easily shrugs off the cords. But the act of binding somehow puts her into a docile, receptive state, and she is unlikely to make a meal of her mate (as some spiders do, but fewer than you might think).

Alas, I would never find out whether T. onustus shares the kinkiness of some of its cousins. Just as the male was trying to climb over onto the female's flower, whoosh, a strong gust of wind sent him sailing away, far in the opposite direction. Frustrating for me, and doubtless more so for him.

Friday arachnid blogging: back once more

... and, my word, it has been a while, hasn't it?

No digressions today on the metaphysics of taxonomy or anything like that. Instead, I'd just like to show you a pretty spider. And here she is, Xysticus sp. (X. cristatus in all likelihood, to judge by the dark-tipped triangle stretching back from behind her eyes; but she could possibly be X. audax instead. Both species are very commonly found in middle Europe.)

Pretty, did I say? Well; jolie-laide more like, perhaps. She is nothing to compare with the real beauties of the Thomisid crab spider family, the living jewels of the genera Thomisus and Misumenops and so on. And yet, as the great arachnologist WS Bristowe wrote of the less gorgeous Thomisids, 'there is something very attractive about even the plainest ones, similar in some respects to the plainness of a toad.'

There's a reason why Xysticus doesn't come in the gorgeous flower-like colours of some of her cousins, and that's because, unlike them, she doesn't hang around on flowers. Her revier is the world of leaves and twigs and stalks and stems. But she catches her prey in the same way. Stock-still she sits, for hours if need be, till some unfortunate insect passes within reach of those Popeye-like forearms. And then whammo, and bon appetit.

And I'm off

Holidays beckon, and I respond. Tomorrow I leave you all for three weeks or so. I shall spend my time learning ancient Hittite, constructing tranmissible prions using a Meccano set and training a monkey to sing. Or perhaps I'll just relax and play with the children.

So you won't be hearing from me for a while. But fret not, PZ Myers; thanks to the miracle of modern TypePad pre-posting I have loaded up a few arachnids for the coming Fridays.

... but, if you break the chain, something terrible will happen to you in ten days!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/testing_meme_propagation_in_blogspace_add_your_blog/

(2) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Browsing the Web

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.6thinternational.org/

(4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03/08/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 10:55:00

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: TypePad

(8) My age is: more adavnced than I should like

(9) My gender is: determined by my chromosomes

(10) My occupation is: lickspittle hireling of the rentier class

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Awasu

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: TypePad

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 02/11/03

(14) My web browser is: Firefox

(15) My operating system is: MS Windows XP

Formentera's other lizards

A couple of months ago I wrote about the ubiquitous lizards of Formentera. I mentioned that Formentera has another lizard, a shy and nocturnal gecko. In a recent comment to that post, a Mr or Ms Lagarto of the Lacerta web project (English version here) corrects me; Formentera has two species of gecko (both immigrants, by the way), Tarentola mauretanica and Hemidactylus turcicus.

Here's a piccie of the only gecko I ever managed to catch on Formentera (and only the second I'd ever seen there):

I've no idea whether this is T. mauretanica or H. turcicus. Our correspondent notes that the latter is even shyer than the former; so perhaps it is the Tarentola. Shy though the gecko in the picture was, it made a number of tactical errors that led inexorably to its being in my hand; had it been the other sort, perhaps I'd never even have seen it.

The other gecko I saw on a wall late at night on an earlier visit to the island. It was feasting on insects attracted by a light. Rather larger than the gecko I caught (who might, though, be a juvenile), it was a thing of ethereal beauty: ghostly pale, dappled with pastel peach, pink and purple. I moved with the care of a hunter to get my camera, but that was enough to spook her. I have seen very few things as beautiful.

Do check out the Lacerta site, by the way; more lizards than you can shake a stick at, and some of them very good-looking indeed.

Repackaged disco keeps my interest

I've just been listening to Entertainment!. The '80s generated a lot of pure shite pop, but when they were on form there were few decades that could compete with them. And with Gang of Four, they were on form indeed.

Oh, there's a lot of criticism one can level at the Gang. I enjoy their undergraduate Marxism in a spirit of postmodern irony, but I'm not certain they were being altogether ironic about it. And the lyrics to Ether--really, there are few things more tiresome than the Irish republicanism of Englishmen. But put all that to one side and consider Damaged Goods:

I can't work,
I can't achieve;
Send me back.
Open the till;
give me the change
you said would do me good.

And I can forgive a lot for a supple, assured bass line.

The only question that remains for me is, why did Gang of Four, after their first LP, begin so suddenly to suck so badly?

Patience with Job

A week or so ago I made so free as to suggest, in a comment on Pharyngula, that (any religious considerations to one side) nobody who loves the English language should fail to have read the bible in the Authorised Version. And that's very true. The KJV and Shakespeare are the bedrock of our tongue, as Luther's bible and Goethe that of modern German or Dante that of Italian. Browse through the KJV (okay, feel free to skip over the 'begats') and you will find, again and again, phrases that have become part of our common patrimony as anglophones.

But I don't want to come over as though the KJV were, y'know, divinely inspired or something. Anybody can have a go at the original text, and if they come up with something more powerful, more poetic than the KJV, well, fair play to them. (As it happens, actually, one can rarely if ever have a go at the original text; that's part of the problem we'll discuss below.)

Now, one of my favourite books in the bible is Job. And Job, in the Authorised Version, is hard going in places, but powerful stuff if one sticks with it. A few years ago, though, Stephen Mitchell proposed a radical new translation.

Continue reading "Patience with Job"

More strange sea creatures from Monterey Bay

Francis Crick has died, I learned today. His achievements will ensure that his memory lives on. But is it not fitting that, as a man who did so much to unlock the secrets of life for us takes his leave, a new and wonderful living thing enters our world?

Well; the bizarre marine worms of the genus Osedax are not really new, though as AP reports they are new to our knowledge. Like the four-armed jellyfish Stellamedusa ventana, they have been found in the waters of Monterey Bay off California.

This is Osedax frankpressi. Like her cousins O. rubiplumus she lives on the skeletons of dead whales at the ocean floor. She lacks a stomach, but that's all right because she harbours bacteria within her that digest fats from the whale bones. She's a few cm long but her husbands--of whom she may have hundreds--are much smaller and live inside her, reduced to little more than sperm factories for her eggs.

DNA analysis suggests that Osedax number among the Siboglinidae, related to those worms--whose pictures we've all seen--that live in the unbelievably hot and sulphurous waters round hydrothermal vents. Like Osedax, the vent worms have harnassed bacteria for a living, albeit in a very different way.

A big tip o' the T6I tam-o-shanter to GW Rouse, SK Goffredi and RC Vrijenhoek for bringing Osedax to the world's attention. You'll find the abstract of their paper in Science here, though I'm afraid you'll need to register to see even that, and pay lots of money to read the paper itself. Or, you can stroll on down to the library with the citation in hand:

Osedax: Bone-Eating Marine Worms with Dwarf Males
G. W. Rouse et al.
Science, Vol 305, Issue 5684, 668-671 , 30 July 2004

Happy reading!

Of a return to sleep; advanced technology; and the morality of intellectual property protection

Ah, ten straight hours spent knitting up the ravell'd sleave. Blissful; delicious.

At this point both financings that had been keeping me so busy are closed. Not without a few heart-in-the-throat moments along the way, I don't mind telling you. One would think that large companies in the middle of large transactions would know better than to, say, adopt a new accounting standard that will require a restatement of Q1 accounts, or merge a guarantor subsidiary with another entity, in the time between the red herring and pricing (or indeed, on the day of pricing itself). One would be wrong.

We've still the proposed Nasdaq listing before us, but here things are very much under control and from now until the date of the confidential submission will largely be a matter of coasting. I'm hardly on holiday, then, but after a series of weeks peaking at just shy one hundred hours billed (not my worst weeks ever, but not far short), life reverts to something approaching normal.

And the best part is that my new iPod has just arrived. It's a bit heavier than I'd expected. Mind-boggling all the same - though it fits easily in one's pocket it has twice the storage capacity of my (venerable, steam-powered, walnut-and-brass) computer.

Configuring the thing took a bit of work, especially as the software in the package was outdated, requiring a hasty (heh) download of the update. But now it appears to function. For its maiden performance this morning, it played Aoxomoxoa to me as I walked to my office. Not for me, this morning, the precision beta-wave substitute of the Goldberg-Variationen, but the peripatetic improvisations of The Eleven. (And yet, as the comments thread to this CT post makes clear, there are plenty of otherwise intelligent people who cannot abide the Dead.)

Some of the things I've loaded onto the iPod I bought fair and square from the iTunes shop. More were burnt from CDs I own, and I believe that is all very well and legal so long as I do not charge people money to listen to my iPod. A good many, though, I confess, were downloaded from KaZaA or (though here I show my age) Napster. Not so very long ago the board of directors and I decided that unlicensed music would no longer be download onto the Tilton hard-drive. (How good it felt, on unpacking the iPod and seeing its little sticker pleading 'Please don't steal music', to be able to assure my new electronic friend that my music-stealing days are behind me.) And indeed, I was vaguely troubled by accessing unlicensed music. Not troubled enough to stop, obviously. And I didn't see it as rising to the level of stealing bread from a starving child. (My download levels were unlikely to attract the RIAA's attention; the decision to stop downloading from P2P networks was more a Caesar's wife sort of thing.) But still.

Now, while I'm generally convinced that not using KaZaA is, on the whole, the Right Thing To Do, I'm not entirely satisfied. The iTunes shop is all well and good, and a fair-priced deal as well. But there are a lot of things I'd like that it simply doesn't have. And this is the great virtue of KaZaA: one finds all sorts of obscure things there that are difficult to find elsewhere, whether online or down at the shop. What is important to me is the availability of this music; I'm more than willing to pay an iTunes-level price for it, there's simply no way to do so with KaZaA.

Would it not be a wonderful thing, then, if some enterprising soul came up with a way to pay a fair fee for music downloaded off a P2P network? Unless and until iTunes or something like it manages to license all music ever recorded, there will almost by definition be obscure material sitting on individual hard drives that one cannot get otherwise without great difficulty, if at all. Wouldn't it be great if I could download, say, Angry Samoans' They Saved Hitler's Cock from KaZaA, 99 cent being automatically deducted from my pre-loaded account and sent to soothe the Samoans' anger?

Oh no, another 'meme'

Chris Bertram of CT infects us with this one, which he caught from Normblog and the Virtual Stoa. Terry Teachout, it seems, is the Green monkey to this list's Marburg fever.

It's a 'forced-choice' thing, apparently. Surely that's wrong, though; Teachout may limit my options to two, but cannot force me to take one. My choices, if any, are in boldface; my comments, if any, follow the relevant pair (though I'm sure this violates the protocol).

Continue reading "Oh no, another 'meme'"

The well-greaved Achaians

Call me a soppy old sentimentalist if you will, but there's something heartwarming in seeing Luis Figo's international career end on a note of failure.

I woke at 18.00 yesterday, having been at the printer 24/7 from the previous Monday until Sunday morning. Then it was off for a 'breakfast' of tapas and the match on a giant open-air screen behind the Old Opera House. Plenty of Greeks about, of course (Germany has a very large Greek population), but I was surprised at the number of Portuguese. Germans like to speak of Frankfurt as though it were the 'German New York', and they are so pitifully wrong in every way but this: you really do find all sorts of people from all over the world here.

It was as an enthusiastic neutral that I was there, but my neutrality was decidedly biased. The Greeks were the clear underdogs; it was astonishing that they had got this far to begin with. A Greek victory would have a bit of the fairy tale about it, and don't we all like fairy tales (unless we are Portuguese).

A fairy tale it was in the end, of course, thanks to Charisteas (whom I have no cause to love, he having helped Werder usurp Bayern Munich's rightful annual plate this past season) and a Greek side playing better Italian football than the Italians themselves have managed for some time now. And best of all, after it was all over, for all their triumphal flag-waving the Greeks behind the Old Opera House spared a moment to console the Portuguese, who in turn congratulated the Greeks on their victory; Greek embraced Portuguese as football united the world in lurv.

The Germans are pleased as punch, too. Greece's triumph is, don't you know, down to having a German manager, Otto Rehhagel (or 'Rehakles', as the gutter press have dubbed him in an unusual feint in the direction of literacy). That's a chauvinism so desperate that I really can't begrudge the Huns their face-saving fantasy. And it might well be that the Germans will profit from Rehhagel's unexpected triumph. Rudi 'Aunt Katie' Völler fell upon his sword after the German side's debacle (his resignation was astonishing, and rather admirable; nobody in Germany was demanding his head). Ottmar Hitzfeld having refused the job, Rehhagel now suddenly tops the short list of candidates for Germany manager. The Greeks will be keen to keep him, but the offer would be awfully tempting; not to mention sweet vindication for a man who was only training the Greeks because he'd been unable to land a decent Bundesliga job.

Of Bach, and lack of sleep

I've just been listening to Murray Perahia's recording of the Goldberg-Variationen. As it happens I have been listening to the Variations over and over again of late, but I have never before heard Perahia's take on them.

These past weeks have been hellish from the time perspective. I am working on two refinancings, both of which have high-yield and bank debt components and one of which involves a capital increase as well. In one case I represent the company, in the other the banks, and one must remember whether one is wearing one's black or white hat. Then there's a third issuer who would like to list on Nasdaq. These three transactions have me flitting from Frankfurt to Bielefeld to Stuttgart to Munich to Basel to London and back again on a near-daily basis. On top of all that comes the usual low-level harassment and interdiction fire from ongoing clients. Hence sleep has been rare, and on many days I have had to go without it altogether.

So how does one get by in an environment of constant sleep deprivation? The first and resounding answer is, of course, 'badly'. But one must somehow make do. And I have done this with the Goldberg Variations. There is probably no work to which I have listened more often than Gould's 1955 recording and I have been hearing it nearly daily - sometimes many times daily - for weeks now. I keep a small MP3 player handy and, when I have a short breathing space in the wee hours, I slip in the ear-plugs and listen to Gould. (I have, with some work, learned to like Gould 1981, but it's the 1955 that I invariably play in these circumstances.)

And, while it's no real substitute for eight solid hours, it does an amazing job of defrazzling my brain. No other music does this as well. That's interesting, as the Variations are not my favourite bit of Bach. That would be BWV 147, whose Wohl mir, dass ich Jesum habe is surely the most beautiful single piece of music ever composed. (Another reason it's interesting, and painfully ironic as well, is that the Variations were - according to a possibly apocryphal tale - composed as a remedy for Count Keyserlingk's insomnia.) Yet thanks to Gould I find myself able to get through another sleepless night and survive another mind-numbing day.

Come Monday the fun begins again, but this weekend I find myself in round-the-clock childcarer mode. Priorities are different. And, with the weans safe a-bed, I popped the Perahia, freshly delivered by Amazon, into the player. Hmm. Very good indeed. I suppose Gould 1955 is the 'canonical' Variations, but Perahia cannot be far behind (and he manages to get through all 32 pieces without audibly humming). I am embarassingly unmusical and will need to listen to Perahia many times before I really know what I think about it. But, on first impression, I would say this: if Gould 1955 is mathematics, Perahia is a dancer's evocation of mathematics.

And, for that very reason, I don't think that Perahia can serve as a sleep-substitute in the way that Gould 1955 does. That's no bad thing. I yearn for free evenings in which I may, relaxed and unburdened, listen thoughtfully to Perahia before retiring for a long night's sleep.

The morning after, perhaps, I can hear what young Martin Stadtfeld has to tell us about the Variations.

Perspective

You've probably noticed something if you've bothered to look at the blogroll over on the left. It's over on the left in more ways than one. I'm not a conservative; I don't much like conservatism. (Some people might classify a lot of my economic views as 'right wing', but that just shows how essentially useless is the right/left paradigm. I'm a liberal and, I hope, a consistent one.) My blogroll doesn't feature many links to Right Blogistan. There's only one really barking mad Tory, and he has the charm and promise of youth (and I'm far from the only non-rightwinger to view him with affectionate ridicule). There's Abiola Lapite, but then Abiola isn't really a rightwinger: libertarian economics + irascibility ≠ conservative. And the remaining three surely number among every leftist's favourite rightwingers.

It's good thing to be reminded from time to time why that should be, and now Eugene Volokh has given us such a reminder.

Continue reading "Perspective"

Emerging from seclusion?

Here's something we can all agree is good news. David Weman appears to be ending his long hiatus. Now if only Amity Wilczek and Charles Murtaugh would do the same....

Of other worlds

One small compensation for my frenetic travels last week was the chance to catch up on my Airport Book reading. Normally I go in for spy thrillers or police procedurals. This time, though, in a spasm of fair-mindedness, I opted for science fiction.

Once upon a time, in comments to a long-ago post by Brad DeLong, I was taken to task by Patrick Nielsen Hayden for snottiness towards 'genre' literature. Mr Hayden's criticisms were somewhat misplaced, I thought. But it's true that I generally dislike and avoid science fiction. So, I thought, why not dip into the genre, trying to approach the exercise with a fresh and unbiased mind.

The books I read (although 'read' is not, as we shall see, unqualifiedly accurate) were:

Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear;
Darwin's Children by the same;
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; and
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

All these tales seem set in the immediate future. The first three have to do with genetic strangenesses. I could not tell you what the fourth is about.

Continue reading "Of other worlds"

Mater et magistra

Over in America last week, I noticed that some Roman Catholic bishops are suggesting that catholic politicians who don't toe their church's line on abortion (most notably, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry) be refused the sacraments. Communion, so the reasoning goes, is for catholics in good standing, and 'good standing' isn't compatible with pro-choice views.

The political wisdom of the bishops' stance I leave for others to debate. Wise or not, though, it is surely the bishops' prerogative to lay down the rules for members of the church they run. Non-RCs like myself have no standing to comment on an internal matter of a private organisation to which we don't belong.

In a broader context, however, even non-catholics can fairly raise questions about what the RC hierarchy is doing. It's hardly a secret that the RC church strongly opposes abortion. But it also strongly opposes capital punishment. Many have asked why the American catholic hierarchy are bashing Kerry et al. with the crozier while welcoming to the altar catholic pols who support the death penalty.

That's a fair question, but I think it misses a larger and more important point. Namely: why is anybody, RC or not, taking seriously the claim of catholic prelates to speak with any moral authority whatever? These are the same shepherds, after all, that for decades knowingly fed the most defenceless of their lambs to clerical predators rather than risk 'scandal', i.e., any risk to their own power, property and prestige.

The spectacle of these mitred hypocrites posing as moral teachers is so grotesque as to be riotously funny. Or rather; it would be funny, if the gaping distance between their posturings and reality were not measured out in the ravaged rectums of little boys.

American catholic politicians facing clerical 'discipline' for being pro-choice would not, I think, be out of order in reminding their bishops of something some old book said about motes and beams. And, as long as the bishops are blowing the dust off that book, they might have a glance at Matthew 18:6 as well.

So nice, I have to say it twice

Greetings to you all from glorious Noo Yawk City! I have had to come here on short notice for some business thing (and I never did manage to link up with the Young Fogey), and now having a bit of spare time, of course I choose to hole up in front of a glowing screen far away from the city's milling streets. But no worries, I shall shortly immerse myself in the teeming throng in search of a bite to eat, for all that the city's entrepreneurial mayor now forbids me an innocent cigarette.

I have been away from New York long enough that I can now, at last, see why the thick carpet of skyscrapers so impresses visitors from the farm. It's so nice to be in a city where there is nothing out of the ordinary in being more than six storeys high. My hotel room on the 25th floor (i.e., the 24th, in the metric system) looks west, rather dramatically, directly upon the roof of the Roman Catholic cathedral; whose vestigial flying buttresses announce that its gothic form is an ironic postmodern joke and whose upper interior stonework, so I am told, is really of papier-mâché. To the left and a few blocks farther west is a building with a suspect resemblance to Frankfurt's MesseTurm. Hmmm... any chance Helmut Jahn once stayed in my room and looked west, sketchbook in hand?

American television is pure abysmal and the native voices, let us tell the truth and shame the devil, are ugly syllable-swallowing things. Yet any country may wear such minor flaws with equanimity that can boast such a glory as New York. I must return to Frankfurt tomorrow, and I don't mind telling you that it'll be a bit of a task to tear myself away.

10 kv

Some time in the past hour or two, T6I (Mk II) received its 10,000th visit. I imagine that, say, Crooked Timber* see that much traffic in a day, but given T6I's much more modest scope, I am tickled nonetheless.

All the greater my sorrow, then, to have to tell you that you will not see me for a few days. I'm off to London where I will be closeted in conference rooms. With any luck, though, I'll have a bit of time free to meet the Young Fogey and judge his taste in waistcoats for myself.

Continue reading "10 kv"

Yet another 100 books

That book-list thing really seems to be making the rounds. Even those of us complaining about it seem compelled to do it, though Frank McGahon, perhaps wisely, demurs. Down in the comments to my previous post, Des von Desbladet links to a second list over at the Grauniad (with a fair amount of overlap with the bloggish list). Meanwhile, over at Pharyngula I see a new list, all ready to be copied, pasted and boldfaced.

In hope of turning this 'meme' into a metameme, below the fold I give you yet another list. It's mostly prose fiction, though I've been far from doctrinaire in my selection. Some of the entries are included on some of the other lists. (So sue me.) I make no claim as to whether or where the listed works fit into the Official Canon of Literary Greatitude. I do not even represent that I have read them all.

But go ahead, have a crack at it - how many of them have you read? And what does that tell you about your literariness? (Hint: precious little.) More importantly, put together your own list and post it on your site. If everybody would do this, we'd all have a lot less time for war and accounting fraud and deliberately spreading typhoid infections, and the world would be a better place.

[UPDATE: Richard of Castrovalva is the first to take up my challenge with this mighty fine list of his own. You should all strive to be more like Richard. Get cracking on those lists - you can't be the first, but you might be the next! (By the way, I once saw a woman wearing a t-shirt with that slogan on it. Whether it referred to the composition of DIY book-lists, I cannot say.) ]

Continue reading "Yet another 100 books"

Shiny, new and beautiful

Tobias Schwarz, a true Meister of all that HTML/CSS/etc stuff that is so much Greek to me, has given A Fistful of Euros a thorough makeover. Check it out, and note in particular the pictures; you'll see a new one every time you visit (or hit 'refresh'). The danger here, of course, is that visitors will be so enrapt by the new format that they'll just stare at the page for hours without reading the incisive articles.

You should note, by the way, that the cool kids apparently now refer to 'AFOE' as 'afoe'. So don't let an inadvertent use of capital letters mark you as so very 26th April.

Call yourself 'literate', do you?

Alas, with very short notice I must be off once more to Bielefeld, that Athens of Eastern Westphalia. But there's one thing I'll vent from my spleen afore I go.

I've seen this on a few blogs now (though it seems to originate here), and it bothers me a bit. I'll talk about what bothers me down below. But first, in a spirit of fairness, I'll play. (Text from the source; boldface my own.)

Continue reading "Call yourself 'literate', do you?"

Would Rosaceae by any other name smell as sweet?

The Panda's Thumb spends most of its time swatting down creationism, especially in its shiny new guise of 'Intelligent Design Theory'. But the truly interesting stuff is real biology, and the Thumb takes time to discuss this as well.

The other day I talked in a very simple way about some of the implication of naming a species. Today, TPT's John Wilkins goes a lot farther, recounting the history of Linnaean classification and talking about a proposed replacement, Phylocode, that would cleave far more closely to phylogenetic history. It's all fascinating stuff, and highly illuminating in pondering whether our classifications of organisms relect some kind of 'reality', or are simply so many names.

More blogs about spiders and webs

If lizards as a substitute for spiders just don't do it for you, or if you simply can't get enough of the little beasts, check out Dinesh Rao's Spiderblog. It's like having an aggregator of all things spidery.

Saturday lizard blogging; or, Woah, oh, what I want to know is, are you (the same) kind?

Those of you who stopped by yesterday for your usual Friday spider fix will have been disappointed, I fear. The curse of earning my bread kept me from my customary spider blogging, for which I am (if possible) even sorrier than you are. But then lizards are in so many ways so very nearly indistinguishable from spiders (eukaryotic; bilaterally symmetrical; really cool) that they may readily serve in the same role. And Saturday is Friday in the base-6 calendar system, or something. So this week it is Saturday Lizard Blogging you shall have.

As I hinted in my first post after returning from Formentera, you can't spend much time on the island before you notice that it is home to a lot of lizards. And I mean a lot. These things are all over the place. By 'these things', I mean Podarcis pityusenis, and here is one of them:

The Formentera lizard has become practically a trademark of the island, and rightly so. Not only ubiquitous, they are attractive, and cheeky as sparrows. Those who live near the open-air beach restaurants will dart under your table to gather crumbs, and with a few minutes' patience you can coax even those living in the parts of the island rarely visited by humans to eat out of your hand (a small piece of apple or banana will do nicely).

But I don't merely want to show you a picture of a good-looking lizard. The Formentera lizard also gives us a good excuse for thinking about something most of us never give much thought to. That is, what do we mean when we say 'species'?

Continue reading "Saturday lizard blogging; or, Woah, oh, what I want to know is, are you (the same) kind?"

A stroll along the Tangled Bank

Another of PZ Myers's splendid ideas has come to fruition. He has innaugurated The Tangled Bank. The Bank is... well, why don't I just quote Prof. Myers:

In cooperation with several other of us geeky science types, I am pleased to announce our own version of the "Carnival of the Vanities". A Carnival is a weekly showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves (that's the vanity part). Each week, one of our crew will highlight a collection of interesting weblog articles in one convenient place, making it easy for everyone to find the good stuff.

Two things will distinguish us from the original "Carnival of the Vanities": 1) we are specifically restricting ourselves to articles in the field of science and medicine, very broadly defined, and 2) we've got a different name.

Tangled Bank is not so much a blog as a sort of floating metablog, a collection of commented links to posts contributors have made on their own blogs. The idea is that the reader will find, conveniently collected in one easy-to-use place, a variety of articles on all manner of things, united only by that very broad definition (and its breadth is important!) of 'science- or medicine-related'.

There is, nonetheless, a Tangled Bank mother-ship website. There you will learn more about the project, including how to contribute; you'll also find an index of who's hosting the Bank when, with links to their websites.

Full disclosure: Prof. Myers was kind enough to include one of my spider posts in the first round. I say this not to blow my own horn (though I am dead chuffed) but to underscore the ethos of the project. You needn't be a professional scientist to participate. Certainly there are pros taking part; but even then, what they post is not the passive-voice-only stuff you'd find in a peer-reviewed journal. As it says on the 'home' website:

Anyone can submit an entry. Even if you don't routinely write about medicine or biology, if you just happen to have written about your gall bladder surgery that week or the pileated woodpecker that has taken to waking you every morning, if you think you've said something interesting and insightful, send it in.

We beseech Thee, O Lord, to fill this little bottle...

Just back from Bielefeld, that buzzin' buzzin' town, where I had to stay longer than I liked (well; even one day would have been longer than I liked). More of the usual boring business stuff, interspersed with short rounds of sleep at the boring business hotel (and a decidedly third-rate one, at that).

But what wasn't boring was my fellow guests at the hotel. As it happens, this hotel was HQ for a big conference and bean-fest of the - I swear I am not making this up - International Institute for the Empirical Study of Theology. (And the empirical theologians were packing the bar as I got back from the meetings late last night.)

What the (if you will pardon the contextually improper intensifier) hell is that about? Theology, as its name implies, is the study of God. Theists and atheists disagree about his existence, but surely they are as one that God is something outside observable nature (either because he's supernatural, or because he simply isn't there). So how, one would love to know, are these theologians studying him empirically? I mean, they must have instruments that neutrino-hunters would love to get their hands on.

Now, it's easy to see how there could be an empirical study of religion (and that's exactly what a number of sociologists and anthropologists do). But that, of course, is another kettle of fish altogether. And no, these guys were not devotees of some earthly idol that one might weigh and measure in the lab. So far as I can tell they were all mainstream Christians. I wish I'd had the chance to ask one of them how he goes about his empirical studies of the Almighty.

The obvious explanation, I suppose, is that the International Institute does not empirically study God so much as theology itself; they are as it were not theologians but theologilogians. Still, they had a definite religious tone about them; it is not as though they were sociologists of religion (who might as easily be unbelievers as believers, and whose belief or unbelief would, in the professional context, be irrelevant). Perhaps they do not, for example, hook up wires to the wafer during a communion service; perhaps they are merely engaged in the study of their own profession rather than its professed object. But surely, for professing Christians (and theologians no less!), that is somewhat, erm, inward looking, isn't it?

Back from the storm-riven Med

We are home once again, having spent two very enjoyable weeks on Formentera. True, the weather was not always all that it could have been. Half our days were lovely; the other half overcast and windy, and two of them quite rainy. Still, we had not gone there to sunbathe and even the grey days were well-suited to rambling and biking along the camins verds. And there was something charmingly surreal about sitting in ca'n Blayet with a glass of wine while the rain poured down on the ordinarily sun-baked Mola. The only nerve-wracking moment was on the day before our departure, when Angel the Ceramicist told us the ferries had been unable to sail that day and tomorrow looked to be more of the same. And to be perfectly honest, the thought of being indefinitely stranded on the island wasn't really so very nerve-wracking at all.

I was reminded, though, of a woman I once saw in a pub in Glencolmcille. A local, she said she had once tired of the incessant showers and clouds of the Donegal coast and packed the family off for two weeks in the Canarias - where it rained every day.

You may have noticed that I am a big fan of Formentera, even when it rains. It's not a holiday destination everybody would enjoy, but for those who like that sort of thing it is addictive. I will be quite busy this week and at the end of it must go for a day or two to Bielefeld (not a holiday destination anybody would enjoy), but I will try to tell you a bit about the island in the next couple of posts - about watchtowers and fishing coves, two kinds of lizard and goat's-cheesecake with mint. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you'll find yourself there one day.

Friday arachnid blogging in absentia; or, Early Monday morning is losing its appeal

As you read this I will be finishing packing up. We are taking the brood off for two weeks' holiday in the Illes Baleares. Specifically, we are headed to Formentera, a small island just south of Ibiza but virtually devoid of the discos etc. that make Ibiza so nice a place to get off a plane and onto a ferry.

So there'll be no posting, and therefore no Friday arachnids, till after the middle of April. Now I know there are millions of you who turn faithfully to this site every Friday for your spider fix. To keep you from jonesing too badly, I've stuck not one but two spiders below the fold; and a couple of pictures of each. Both are spiders I collected on Formentera in 2001; both are a bit unusual.

Continue reading "Friday arachnid blogging in absentia; or, Early Monday morning is losing its appeal"

More evidence that I will never be as good as Matthew Turner at this sort of thing

Peter Cuthbertson experiences an altogether Damascene conversion.