BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time produced another corker today: plate tectonics. Three experts, a well informed chairman guiding the discussion and 45 minutes of lucid science talk without need for CGI. You can listen again or get the podcast at the home page. Well worth it.
Scienceblogger Greg Laden and to evolved homeschool blogger Freerangeacademy for bringing my (as yet) unidentified fossil (found here) to much wider attention. The Flying Trilobite has suggested it’s an Atlantean’s foot print.
And I’d also like to thank…what? I haven’t won an Oscar. Oh. Ok.
Look at the British media and you might think that the only story worth reporting from India is dismal Gordon Brown’s visit. Not so. They’re firefighting an outbreak of H5N1 amongst poultry in west Bengal, and the culling teams are being attacked by locals anxious not to lose chickens, a valuable source of protein. There has been an outbreak in Iran (which they tried to keep schtum), a recent human death of H5N1 in Indonesia, again little reported in the UK. Unlike the death of five swans.
Does anyone have any idea what this is? I thought it might be the counterpart of a belemnite mantle surrounding the guard, but someone who knows says it’s not like any mantle he’s seen. And he’s seen a few. It was found in lower jurassic shale on a beach in north North Yorkshire, England. The guard impression is 60mm long, the leaf-shaped impression around it 40mm wide.
‘Hallo!’ said Tigger. ‘I’ve found somebody just like me. I thought I was the only one of them.’
Pooh got out of bed, and began to explain what a looking glass was, but just as he was getting to the interesting part, Tigger said: ‘Excuse me a moment, but there’s something climbing up your table,’ and with one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the table-cloth, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully, ‘Have I won?’
‘That’s my table cloth,’ said Pooh, as he began to unwind Tigger.
‘I wondered what it was,’ said Tigger,
‘It goes on the table and you put things on it.’
‘Then why did it try to bite me when I wasn’t looking?’
‘I don’t think it did,’ said Pooh.
‘It did,’ said Tigger, ‘but I was too quick for it.’
From House at Pooh Corner by A.A.Milne. Everyone should make a Rissolution to make sure they introduce children to Pooh, Piglet, Wol, Rabbit, Kanga, Roo, Heffalumps, Jagulars and 100 Aker Wood in the original with the E.H.Shepherd drawings. Not the sins crying out to heaven for vengeance that are the neotenic Disneyfied versions.
The Wikipedia page on Tigger, has a section on ‘personality traits.’ Oh dear.
A peacock butterfly, Inachis io, on the old railway line in Runswick Bay, North Yorkshire, August 2007.
on the BBC by people who should know better:
Another discussion about 24 hour news, and Radio 5 Live morning presenter Victoria Derbyshire this week asked whether people preferred an ‘upsum’ of news.
And this morning on the Week in Westminster Dawn Butler MP said ‘upskilling’.
There is a difference between a language evolving and what Orwell would have labelled ‘manifestly barbaric’, and upscrewing the English language in this manner is the latter. Both should have their legs slapped and be sent to bed without any tea.
Broadcasting at its very finest, you can foorgive the BBC a lot for this wonderful show. Go get the podcast (requires knowledge of the world outside America) and laugh your ass off for 30 minutes. This week’s show is a knockout. Fred Macauley’s anecdote of trying to find out a Scotland football result from the Great Wall of China is excellent.
Answers Reseach Journal makes it to the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, where Nature writer Adam Rutherford calls on reasonable Christians to rise up en mass(e) and seize their faith from the hands of the extremists, who believe and indeed write this shite.
Mr Rutherford makes some splendid points:
But sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
Indeed. And:
Huh? Short of putting two pencils up my nose and saying “wibble”, I’m not sure even how to respond.
Bit of an orifice fixation going on at Nature. Only joking, it’s well worth a read. Of course, he doesn’t make the point, the valid point, that the ‘reasonable’ Christians act as the foundation from which these fraudsters, liars and intellectual debasers grow.
