...more recent posts
linda is prob rite but i hope not.....
can woman play in MLB, or is mens only?
25 more minutes of Katrina
web urbanist
alex the parrot
Dog walking: good for you, good for your pet.
Not so good for birds, apparently.
Australian researchers have found that walking leashed dogs along woodland paths leads to a significant reduction in the number and diversity of birds in the area, at least over the short term.
Peter B. Banks and Jessica V. Bryant of the University of New South Wales surveyed birds along woodland trails near Sydney shortly after dogs were walked on them or after people walked alone. All kinds of dogs were involved, big and small, purebred and mutt. As a control, they also surveyed birds on trails that no one, human or canine, had recently walked on.
Dr. Banks said the study was an outgrowth of his interest in predator-prey interactions. “Here you have a predator that is being walked through the bush quite regularly,” he said.
The researchers chose trails in places where dogs were banned and in other areas where dog walking was common, expecting different results in each. “We thought that where there was regular dog walking birds would get used to it,” Dr. Banks said. “Well, they didn’t.”
Regardless of the type of area, dog walking led to a 35 percent reduction in the number of bird species and a 41 percent reduction in overall bird numbers, compared with the control. (People walking alone caused some disturbance, but less than half that caused by people with dogs.)
Lipkin set aside the bits and pieces of DNA from the bees and started sorting through what was left, searching for material found only in beehives infected by CCD. What they found, eventually, was a bee-killing virus first identified in Israel.
These findings have now been published online by the journal Science.
But both Pettis and Lipkin are quick to note that they have yet to prove conclusively that the Middle Eastern virus they found is the sole cause of CCD.
"Right now, we are claiming it is a marker in Colony Collapse Disorder," Pettis explains. "We have shown that it is present when colonies are collapsing, but we haven't shown cause and effect."
waterproof (birdwatching?) gloves
create your own snowflake
Many say the incident might not have happened if not for the nooses
Size of english language Wikipedia if you printed it out.
Kleiner Kerl spiel Gitarre
Another NYC panorama pic, this time from the annoyingly named Top of the Rock.
Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies
they reprint some of the dialog from her stories. a very natural style.
To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, hairpin rhetorical reversals and capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.
sad irony alert:
More than 50 pit bulls seized from Michael Vick’s property must be claimed by today, or they could be euthanized.
Federal prosecutors filed court documents last month to condemn 53 pit bulls seized in April as part of the investigation into dogfighting on Vick’s property. No one has claimed any of the dogs, which are being held at several unspecified shelters in eastern Virginia.
Federal prosecutors declined to comment Wednesday on the seized dogs. Typically, when confiscated property goes unclaimed, the government asks the court to have the items declared forfeited. In this case, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson will make the final decision on the dogs’ fate.
“There’s no dispute over who owns the dogs,” said Daphna Nachminovitch, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “Obviously this is not going to be a process where someone steps forward and says, ‘This is my dog, can I have her back, please?’ ”
Although Hudson, who also is handling Vick’s criminal case, will determine what becomes of the pit bulls, Nachminovitch said it’s likely that they will be euthanized because they’re not adoptable as pets.
“These dogs are a ticking time bomb,” she said. “Rehabilitating fighting dogs is not in the cards. It’s widely accepted that euthanasia is the most humane thing for them.”
Monoscope.com. Maybe up Bill's alley?
mobile home anyone?
(from erin)
rip joybubbles
"Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C."
Wikiscanner: "List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations."
rip da scooter
Today is the 8th anniversary of the registering of digitalmediatree.com.
The other day I was pondering how scientists tattoo themselves with their science.