Saturday, June 18, 2016

Coffee and Provocation


One More Thing Not Extinct
The headline screams "Nepal’s Extinct Bird Spotted After Disappearing for 178 Years." The article, however says the bird was thought to be "locally extinct" and a quick search finds it's found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Camdodia, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam. In short, all over. The "extinction" headline is nonsense. Again. This is not uncommon fare, as I noted more than a decade ago on this blog. The bad news about species loss is that the good news is almost never reported. 

A Roman Terror Weapon
It whistled while it worked.

Aborting the Boys to Prevent Infanticide
Would you like coffee and juice with your little shop of horrors?

The Continuing Crisis
Western children aren’t exposed to enough microbes.

Models, Miracles, Monsters
The first monkey has genetically engineered to have Parkinson’s disease.

Cheeto-colored Tax Cheater
Trump's 1984 tax return listed no income, yet he deducted $626,264 as expenses.

Real Hero Not a Zero
Check the name. Check the service. Salute.

A Bears Right to Arms
The continuing crisis.

We Built This City on Death and Destruction
Watch this interactive map of urbanization over the last 5,700 years.

Bird Brained is a Compliment
From Ars-Technica: "Birds pack neurons into their brains at densities well above densities in mammals' brains, putting some relatively compact bird brains into the same realm as those of primates when it comes to total cell counts..."

1 comment:

Rick said...

I worked for a mink rancher in Sonoma, CA, in the mid 1970s, and he used those male chicks for mink food. Most of them were already dead when we got them, but I "rescued" a live chick one day, and we raised Fred to maturity. We were surprised to see him lay an egg one day. I guess the chicken sexers at the poultry farm in Petaluma ("Chicken Capital of the World") were 100% accurate. We changed her name to Fredricka. Maybe he/she was a forerunner in the gender identity struggle.