Just watched Prince of Egypt. It's one of the last movies we bought on VHS, unfortunately. But I got Road to El Dorado from Netflix recently, and then decided to get Prince of Egypt, too. It's a really good movie ( Read more... )

Yesterday was wildlife day at the apartment: fruit flies and baby squirrels. These are different in every regard:

Fruit flies:
Very annoying
Lots of them
All over, in the apartment
But given that we have fruit flies, we've got (I think) the coolest species to have, Drosophila melanogaster itself (the standard genetics experiment fly ( Read more... )

Moving Week, Day One

I packed up stuff this morning to take to the new apartment, since I left Santa Cruz today and won't be back until after we move in.

But I will be back in Santa Cruz in a week and a half, and most weeks thereafter. So for now, I only packed up basic essentials that I'll need in the next week, like The Pterosaurs: From Deep ( Read more... )

Somebody was wondering to me recently (I don't remember exactly who, chances are sarkat), "why are sea birds almost always black and white?" I didn't have anything to say at the time, but I was thinking about it yesterday and today ( Read more... )

Thinking about pre-modern machines this past week. Lionardo's, and Heron's. And those of kobolds and gnomes and dwarves and humans (A. gracilis, not H. sapiensNow I want to build wood machines ( Read more... )

Trichromat (e.g. humans, bees)
Cones: S, M, L

Combinations:
SM, ML: metamersSL: purple (not metameric to any pure wavelength ( Read more... )

quick background: hryaxes are small, vaguely rodent-like animals related to elephants. They have no good name in English, being called hyraxes (from Gr. ὑραξ/hýrax: "shrewmouse") or dassies (from Dutch dassie, dim. of das: "little badger"). In the King James Bible, mentions of hyraxes were translated as coney (rabbit), because the English had no ( Read more... )

It seems to be oft repeated on the internet that octopuses seem to be color-blind. Or, as Wikipedia says, "Surprisingly, they do not appear to have color vision". This is surprising, but I think it is poorly backed up.

I find two studies. One from 1977 which puts forward evidence that "Octopus is Colour-Blind", by which Messesnger means O. ( Read more... )

So. The other day, pne made a post that included the word Rotwelsch, as the name of a language. After a little bit of research on the language I had a sudden analysis of Rotwelsch as "Road-Welsh", i.e. a foreigner language spoken by Travellers.

sarkat wondered if that had anything to do with rottweilers. I can find no etymology for Rottweil, but I did ( Read more... )

I'm rebuilding this chart in DOT, a graph scripting language (graph as in a flowchart type thing, not the graph of an equation).

While I'm at it, I'm revising, correcting, and expanding the chart. I'm trying to add in every tax on this list for one thing ( Read more... )