Interesting Links for 28-01-2013

[andrewducker]

• Birds are dinosaurs. Apes are monkeys. People are bony fish. Why classification is hard.
  (tags: life genes organisation ontology )
• 25 reasons why Sir Christopher Lee is amazing
  (tags: christopherlee )
• How the War on Sex Workers hurst women.
  (tags: sex sexwork epicfail feminism )
• How do people from the big cities such as Moscow view Russians from

Comments

[andrewducker]

The badger is sheer silliness. The next strip on takes it to the next step :->

And yeah, I love that people are bony fish, despite quite clearly not being bony fish. Talking about things is hard.

[vereybowring]

Sleep problems causing memory problems seems about right from my recent experiences in the last few years.
Since the prolonged insomnia started for me I've gone from remembering just about everything to remembering very little. Coupled with concentration issues as well I have days where I struggle to function anywhere near how I used to.

And yes Christopher Lee is startlingly amazing.

[andrewducker]

Working fine for me (ancient version of Firefox).

[woodpijn]

I thought the memory/sleep thing was fairly established.

I can testify to it as a parent. I have very few memories of Bethany's first year. (And this is probably why older parents say the early years fly by - because they have so few memories of them.)
I don't much mind not having many memories of newborn Bethany because newborns don't do anything very interesting anyway, but we're hoping to have another one at some point and then I might not have any memories of Bethany's fourth or fifth year, which would be sad.

[rhythmaning]

To be honest, I don't have the energy to read the post on classification (which I will return to!), but I beleive a lot of the problems stem from the fact that it is a wholly human construct. I have been thinking of writing a post about this...

Defining a species is an art, and irrelevant to the organisms - they just want to live and reproduce. Where the lines are drawn can be arbitrary: one recognises where a species boundary is (and I did some taxonomy when younger), but specifying it is really hard.

[andrewducker]

The post is worth reading.

And it's not about defining individual species - but about the fact that the way that people want to define species is usually based on characteristics that are externally obvious, but this doesn't always tie in with the actual genetic relationship between them.