Links — May 21, 2009, 9:09 am
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I attend auctions primarily to study the behavior of the kill buyer, whose main client is a slaughterhouse, and to provide more transparency to this aspect of the horse industry. Occasionally I buy a horse. — “The Path to Slaughter at a Horse Auction,” Alex Brown, The New York Times
Toddler purchases earth-moving equipment online; fathers become more involved when teens engage in risky sexual behavior; intellectual property asshole competition
[Primatologist Chris] Beard was also puzzled that the authors did not compare Darwinius to an important early anthropoid fossil Beard found, known as Eosimias. In fact, he was underwhelmed by the entire comparison of Darwinius to other primates (a phylogenetic analysis): “The phylogenetic analysis is not very complete, and I would certainly interpret many of the characters they do cite very differently than they do. But one of the most shocking things of all about the technical paper is that they found room to cite 89 references, but there is not one mention of Eosimias to be found there. This is bizarre indeed. In a paper that purports to tell us something about anthropoid origins, the authors have conveniently ignored the single most significant fossil that has been published to date. Incomprehensible.” — “Darwinius: It delivers a pizza, and it lengthens, and it strengthens, and it finds that slipper that’s been at large under the chaise lounge for several weeks…” Carl Zimmer, Discover/The Loom
Gurkhas can settle in UK; Distributed Proofreaders releases Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Arthur Rackham
The Squid, a lightweight disc about the size of a manhole cover, lies on the road and ejects rubbery tentacles on command to ensnare fleeing vehicles and drag them to a stop. –“In the Spirit of Spider-Man, the Border Patrol Casts Its Web,” Stephanie Simon, The Wall Street Journal
Percentage by which the risk of type 2 diabetes increases for every two hours a day that a person watches television:
Two bottled ghosts—of an old man and a young girl—were sold at auction in New Zealand.
The practice of sexualized eyeball licking was causing conjunctivitis in Japanese sixth graders.
