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POPSThis Day in History-July 21 'Infamous Monkey Trial' "To show up fundamentalism,""to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States." said Darrow. So what has changed after 80 years of intellectual backwardness?! Would this case be out of place in Bush's America - in the land of the 'free and home of the brave', mired in debt and death of its own making? Where now is the shinning beacon of liberty? What country has made 'democracy' a dirty word. What county elects an AWOL drunk as commander-in-chief, TWICE? Where is the KKK a white sheet away from power and the noose? What country is still loved even by it pseudo enemies?
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POPSSex, lies and some existential questions.. :-) So many orchids treat their pollinators so nastily, with false promises of food and sex or the occasional dunking of insect visitors into bucket-shaped petals full of liquid, that naturalists have puzzled over the relationship for more than a century. Darwin was so consumed by the odd interactions that after “The Origin of Species,” his next book was an entire volume on the subject, “The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.”
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POPSCréer un executable pour un programme Ruby Un truc intéressant, comment faire un exécutable d'un programme en Ruby... "La librairie Rubyscript2exe (http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/) permet de construire un (gros) exécutable contenant l'interpréteur Ruby + les librairies utilisées par le programme + le programme Ruby."
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POPSFlatfish caught evolving, thanks to its roving eye Now Friedman reports finding two different missing links. They are fossil fish with their eyes in different places on the two sides of their skulls - one in the normal position and one closer to the midline (see Diagram). One is Amphistium, a previously described genus found in several fossil deposits in Europe, in which the asymmetry went unnoticed because in fish fossils only one side of the animal is generally preserve. The other is Heteronectes, a new genus. At 10 to 20 centimetres long, the specimens were clearly adults and not larvae in which the eyes were migrating
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POPS"Haughton's Drop", Hanging, Dublin Zoo, Darwin, Wallace, history Haughton House in Dublin Zoo is being restored to its ancient glories in honour of the great patron and scientist. On a visit to Bronx Park, New York he became a bit bored by the record of perfection which he received on all sides, so he enquired about the financial aspect of the institution: how did they pay for their obviously princely expenditure? So-and-so, he was told, but of course the main source of income was gate-money. “What ?” asked Haughton, “do you mean you charge people to get in?” “Of course; don’t you?” “Oh! no - we let them in free; then we enlarge one of our celebrated lions and charge them to get out! We do better that way.”
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POPS"Zorba the Israeli" His most famous book, "Zorba the Greek," was published in 1946. Its appearance in English in the United States, in 1954, made its author a runaway success that exposed him to the rest of the world. Zorbas became an adored figure in Western culture, and his prescription for life, passions and animal instincts were idealized. He came to represent all of Greek culture. Kazantzakis wrote many books. "The Last Temptation of Christ" roused a storm of controversy when it appeared. (the film version of the book was released, directed by Martin Scorsese with a soundtrack composed by Peter Gabriel.) "It's the combination of the landscape and the people," Melzer a former philosophy professor says "Greeks have an endless ability to be happy, and we Israelis can only learn from them."
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POPSNewsweek - television minus electricity Read the whole piece by Scott McLemee. The Newsweek article declared Lincoln the winner, by the way. (full disclosure: I am a "Facebook friend" of McLemee's, which is to say, I'm not really a friend of his at all) CLARIFICATION: He friended me after I signed up as a fan of his blog. Other than that we have had no personal contact at all.
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POPSJohann Hari: Science is thrilling – except in our schools At Primary School level, often teachers teach little science as this is often hands on, and they keep the messy lesson for art. Also, some teachers at this level just are not science people, forcing themselves to be proficient at maths in stead. I pushed early on for teachers to move from class to class teaching from their area of expertise. Attitudes became more positive.
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POPSUnintelligent Design At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth. The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
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