“Most people want a world with simple black/white answers but you must realize that there are many shades of gray in between and this is the reality of spider identification.”
— Vetter and Antonelli, “How to Identify (or Misidentify) the Hobo Spider”
My favorite part is the twist at the end!
"Allusion through similarity of form is, I have discovered, a marvelously rich vein of self-reference, but unfortunately this article is too short to contain a full proof of that discovery."
—Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas
Just when I had given up hope (due to misleading news coverage that suggested the round=planet proposal was a fait accompli), the IAU finally made the right choice regarding Pluto. The additional criterion (missing from an earlier version of the BBC report) is that a planet must have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." I had been hoping for requiring that it possess the majority of the mass in its orbital region, but anything that gets us down to the eight bodies with shared origins and finally excludes the Kuiper Belt is okay with me.
My interpretation is that, faced with solid evidence of the absurd results of crafting an objective standard that allowed Pluto to be commonly referred to as a planet (even the proposal separated the 8 "classical" planets from the "plutons" (bizarrely including Ceres)), only the most sentimental of the scientists could bring themselves to support it.
Another cool thing I find last. But that’s ok, cause they have the archives online.
Quote of the day: "Children who are developing on a typical development track actually tell very unfunny jokes, so we have provided that facility for non-speaking children as well." That from Dr Annalu Waller, a researcher on the System to Augment Non-speakers’ Dialogue Using Puns (Standup), as reported by the BBC.
A walking tour of Oxford featuring scientific landmarks!
I have only browsed as far as the soups, but the recipes in the 1902 cookbook With a Saucepan Over the Sea sound really good. Now I’m hungry!
This has been passed around at work, but I’m a little leery of cooking methods that might leach complex molecules into my food. I wondered if oven bags might be more appropriate to the job, but Alcoa has anticipated me, and gives a firm no.
And while doing this research, I ran across tasty Cajun side dishes in boil in bag format.
UPDATE! Seal-a-Meal bags! Really!
Make pictures all pixellated so you can knit them up.