good fortune

fortunas, originally uploaded by sammarin.

One of the very coolest things about today was that a monkey told my fortune at the fiesta in Ichu. In the market, there were all kinds of stands, including ones that featured fortune-telling monkeys and parrots. The guy in the white hat touches the monkey to your head so it can ¨leer la mente¨(read your mind), and then the monkey picks out with its tiny hand a little folded up piece of paper from the drawer below and hands it to you. Of course all the fortunes are good - but I was (of course) still delighted.

Farewell, Spanky

Brett sent me this Denver Post article yesterday about the medieval business that's going down at the Denver Zoo (poor Spanky!). And then I saw a link on Fark this morning about schools cancelling visits to the zoo because of the incident.

I think, truly, the best thing about Fark is the one-line teasers Drew provides for each item. I clicked on the link because my iGoogle Fark feed read:

[Dumbass]: Elementary school cancels zoo trip over fear that children will eat plague-infected squirrels

Too many damn beavers ?!?!!

First of all, pardon the profanity, but I am trying to pat down my hackles as I type this.

I work in Sacramento, but the college is very close to Elk Grove, which is a suburb that has pretty much exploded in the past 10 years with little-boxes-made-of-tickytacky, and Linens-n-Things conveniently located across the street from Bed Bath & Beyond (so that you have your very important choice of which specialty bed/kitchen store you want to patronize) and a drive-through Starbucks on every corner, etc etc, you know the drill. So I was interested to read an article in the Sac Bee (see if you can access the link) about how Elk Grove plans to eradicate beavers.

People, why is it that we care so much about a couple of whales (article from SFGate) but when it comes to everyday critters like beavers building their inconvenient dams and messing up the workflow of human overpopulation and urban sprawl, we don't give a crap about anything but ourselves? Kill em. Dealing with the dams takes too much of our resources.

Nevermind the point that resident Tom Russell brings up, that "When beavers are left alone, they create new ecosystems and sanctuaries for 'quite a few species of fish, turtles, snakes, animals, birds and plants' without threatening humans or safety."

Grrrr...

pant pant

Image by Zoe Cormier at Zoetic.

more fantastical sea beasts

Check out this and other amazing images from as far down as four and a half miles below the surface of the sea...

They come from “The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss” (University of Chicago Press, 2007), by Claire Nouvian, a French journalist and film director (as reported by the NYT).

"worm lizards" and the like are messing things up, but beer makes it all better.

As NPR reports: "This month marks the 300th birthday of Carl Linnaeus, Sweden's beloved botanist who gave order to the plant and animal kingdoms." However, as the segment continues: "Modern science is complicating Linnaeus' ranking system. DNA analysis often shows that two organisms, thought to be distant relatives, are actually first cousins. There are now sub-orders, super-orders, even 'tribes.'"

See, for example, this "bloated earthworm" which scientists did not know how to rank until recent DNA testing showed them to be closely related to some of the most common lizards in Europe. All I know is... looks de-licious.

In other science news from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, all it takes for science to become interesting to adults is beer. The paper reports on Science on Tap, a monthly forum for people to learn about and discuss timely scientific issues while swilling microbrews. Recent and upcoming topics include: enzyme-level figures contrasting how men and women hold up under the unremitting stress of caring for a loved one, and the exchange of cells between mother and child during pregnancy.

Rock on, Seattle scientists! Sacramento, Davis... how about asking us out for a drink?

teeming with lifeforms

BBC reports discovery of cool undersea Antarctic creatures. Made me think of Mara, my marine biology fiend.