Category Archives: Science

today in Microscopic Octopus news

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Baby octopus

So how cool is that? Can't you just imagine it cloned and grown huge, with a frickin' laser beam on its head? Oh fine, be that way. But I can. And there's more microscopic Squid-and-Octo-tacity where that came from:

Clio, don't look at me it's the scientific name!

The BBC reports on new aquatic coolness from the bottom of the ocean.

A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science.

They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish.

The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world…

"The deep ocean below 1,000m (3,300ft) is rarely sampled," observed Peter Wiebe, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, lead scientist on the recent voyage…

Salpa Maxima

[finds] include shrimp-like copepods and ostracods, swimming worms, and tiny jellyfish – some of the gooiest and most fragile animals in the sea.

This was one of the first projects to sequence DNA at sea, a process which Dr Wiebe believes will become much more common as scientists seek quick and easy ways to identify species.

See? Cloning comin' up! Tolja!

Salp. Bet you're happy they're microscopic; who wants to see that in their sushi?

Operation Global Media Domination: Hit me again, I can take it, I’m Irish

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TIABehold, the chart which means more to me than an ECG, more than a roundel of feed stats, more than a breakdown of paycheque deductions (I think that's what it's called…paycheque… so hard to remember).

The Blog Hits Chart:

Blog Stats May 4 2006

Should I worry that the original size of this chart was 1040x666? Naaaaaaaaaaah.

In unrelated news, a friend of mine set me an intriguing test a couple of years ago. Can you name the seven deadly sins, WITHOUT consulting so much as your cat, much less Google or an actual Bible? Bet you can't, and I bet I know the one you leave off…everyone does. But not as completely or as well as I do.

Where was I? Ah yes, blog stats.

I have to say, when I went to bed last night things were looking good. I had already hit my "feel smug" baseline, which is 200. Now, you readers and I know quite well that if it weren't for a certain pair of nesting bald eagles and another pair of nesting bald eagles and my tendency to post the URL of relevant blog passages on the Guardian newsblogs (which are otherwise starved both of relevance and passagity, or is that passagassity?) I'd never see 200 hits in a day even if I caught Stephen Harper eating a baby on YouTube and you and I both know he's too smart for that: he has them brought to him pureed, in smoothies. Well, he must; he's never been photographed eating a baby, but who can tell what's in those cups eh? EH? Answer me that, me lad!

Where was I? Oh yeah, smug.

And when I got to the compy in the late PM, just before the statcounter clicked over from Today to Tomorrow, I was dumbfounded, for lo, I had done almost double the hits of my previous best day ever.

All because of bald eagles, ball-chasing Boris, and Beautiful Agonies.

And I, consumed in the glow of the ascendant short-tailer or is that bodian as opposed to long-tailer, clicked away for a moment, beaming with the irreproducable joy of having seen that graph approach the very top of the box.

FOOL THAT I WAS! FOOL, I SAY!

For lo, when I clicked back WordPress had analyzed the hit trend and decided to bump me back to the bottom of the graph; they have put the top bar at Eight Fucking Hundred and Ten Goddam Hits!

You know, in Fisherman's Wharf there are barrels and barrels of crabs and the fishmongers don't put any lids on them; they don't need to. When a crab makes a break for it and tries to crawl out, the others reach out and pull him back to the bottom.

Not that I'm bitter. Continue reading →

Don’t mind me. I’m just a…

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Bitter CanadianBitter Canadian.

From DrinkNation, here is the Bitter Canadian although surely it cannot be the only one, particularly during the Playoffs.

While the recipe sounds like a pretty standard Whiskey Sour on the rocks, with bonus bitterness, this is NOT how one makes a drink like this. Puh-leeze! See if you can spot the errors.

Bitter Canadian

In a highball glass with ice, add the following in order:

1 1/2 oz Canadian Whiskey

sour mix to fill

2-3 dashes Angostura Bitters

squeeze of a wedge of fresh lemon

Continue reading →

Operation Global Media Domination: “I May Have to Start Reading the Independent Instead” Edition

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TIAOne is slightly fucking annoyed, one is. It's one thing to be ripped off and quoted inflammatorily out of context by the Mirror, but it's quite another to have a blog comment I left on the Guardian used as a springboard to a blog post made for pay and without attribution, most particularly when said blog post is already several days out of date.

That's the thing that bugs me about the Guardian blogs; they're not blogs, they're dumping grounds for stuff several days old, not worth putting on paper, or otherwise afterthought. It's all filler, just something to click on while you're waiting for that damn marketing report to load in the background.

That's not what a blog is meant to be. Ruskin woulda been a great blogger. "Have nothing in your blog that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful," makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I happen to think Giant Squid are beautiful. Not everyone agrees with me, but this ain't a forum. It's a blog.

It has a perspective, it has a voice, and most of all it has a certain currency.

This does not. By the time it was posted, one of the eggs mentioned had been missing for several days. The other is no longer expected to hatch. And yet the post happily burbles on about anticipation and the pair of eggs and how really fantastic it's going to be in a few days when they hatch, lalalalalalalalalalalalala. How did they get this story in the first place?

Funny you should ask.

Let's be fair; it could have happened one of two ways. Either:

A) the writers of the news blog do not actually read the news blog, and came to the story via old-fashioned wire services in which case the editor needs a good spanking

or

B) they got it from my posts in this thread and this thread, much earlier in the news blog and just googled for some background. In which case the editor needs a good flaming.

I don't demand cash. I don't expect flowers. But not so much as a LINK????

and for some reason I am unable to get to the sign in page today. Could there be more conclusive proof that there is no liberal media conspiracy?

Market Report: Vegans up, Texans and Albertans way, way down

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NosferatuForget the market for virgins; the hottest new opportunity is the market for vegans! Because of breaking news in the Guardian that Mad Cow Disease has been transmitted through tainted human blood products, the body-juice of a vegan is now far more valuable than the potentially-deadly, germ-soupy gore of a carnivore. Per pint, vegans are now worth several times as much as meat-eaters on the open market, to say nothing of the back alleys of Whitechapel and the farther reaches of Transylvania.

Hmmm, some of my clean-living friends had better watch their backs. The next time someone squeezes you in a crowded bar, maybe he's just trying to see how juicy you are. Try not to squish, okay?

The government has been forced to warn 14 Jack the Medical Laboratory Techniciancountries that patients are in danger of developing the human form of mad cow disease as a result of contaminated British blood products sold abroad.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that patients in Brazil and Turkey are most at risk from the products, although it is too early to know how many, if any, foreign patients may develop the incurable variant CJD, as it takes many years to appear…

The contaminated blood products were exported in the 1990s…Health authorities then had to re-examine blood products sent abroad by the state-owned company Bio Products Laboratory (BPL)…