Oh, hey blog.  Not much.  Touch-and-go lately.  Got the DFA reissues of the first two Pylon albums: Gyrate (plus) and Chomp (more) in the mail this weekend, thanks.

Not that I should really be adding anything to my plate at this point, but I’ve started a gig writing science stories for the online only San Francisco Examiner newspaper, check out the first installment here.

Also, go check out the recently redesigned 3D Museum website.

pax.

Figure 3. Copulation duration in Cynopterus sphinx according to whether the female licks the male's penis (Licking) or not (No licking). Means and standard errors are shown. Vignette shows a female performing fellatio, drawn by Mei Wang. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595.g003

Shocking silence on the interwebs on this one – or maybe I’m just not reading the right blogs?

Tan M, Jones G, Zhu G, Ye J, Hong T, et al. (2009) Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7595. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595

Okay back to work.

When will wordles supplant dissertation proposals?  Not soon enough my friends, I can tell you that.  Have to say though, that looks about right….

Last Sunday I woke up in Bristol, England and went to bed in California.  What happened in between is not that interesting — basically I woke up late, missed my bus, had a panic attack, wound up taking a cab from Bristol to Heathrow (which was I’m afraid, not cheap), called my wife and woke her up to get my flight info, got laffed at by the driver ‘forgot about the time difference did you?,’ heard about his more notable fares (François Fillon and some British celebrities I’d never heard of), charmed my way through the ticket counter (they wanted to bump me to another flight), barely made my plane, watched some of this Morgan Spurlock show (decent, kind of boring), listened to “Well You Needn’t” about a million times, ate some kit-kats, I dunno I guess that was about it.

POINTLESS SEMIOTIC DIATRIBE FROM THE BACK OF THE CAB: The sign on the back of this British lorry which we are rapidly overtaking inquires: “Well driven?”  Effing brilliant.  Really breaks down the metonymic (synechdochic?) chain summoned by the American version: “How’s my driving?”  Lets you damn the driver without directly insulting the truck.  Blah blah blah dyadic v. triadic sign relation schemes blah blah blah différance recursion representamen, whatever.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE:

Would have loved to catch Maximum Joy, but I guess I was about three decades too late.  Pity.  Also, I didn’t catch nearly the volume of Banksy I was hoping to–in fact only ever saw this one: though from various angles and lights and states of relative insobriety.

Bristol, as Jeffrey Martz observes, has a decidedly Escherian feel, each time I tried to take a short-cut I wound up in interesting places far from my intended destination.  I very nearly missed the Attenborough lecture this way.  This is also how we spotted the fox in a back alley, ’round midnight.  It looked like this,

but with a fox.

THE MOST SURPRISING THING I HEARD AT SVP:

, considering the source–a University of Chicago grad student (name withheld for fear that he might be expelled or worse).  We were admiring at these artiodactyl accouterments

“Animals are not equations,” says he.  “Can I quote you on that?” says I.

SOME MORE PICTURES OF PEOPLE, SINCE I CAN’T TOP THAT:

Here is a photo of @cromercrox I took with my phone:

And here is a photo of @microecos (and assorted internet celebrities including the folks behind Dinosaur Hunting by Boat in Alberta, the Ethical Paleontologist, the Open Source Paleontologist, the SV-POW boys) taken with his:

And of course, there is an interesting story attached to this,

but it involved diacritical maneuvres far beyond my skill set which makes this as good a place as any to stop.

Thanks, and apologies, to all.

Amidst neglecting this blog I managed to put together a post on the some of the crazier zoological news of the summer. Go check it out over at Paw-talk.net !

Just a short note to commemorate International Vulture Awareness Day -

My mother shot this photo of two California Condors (Gymnogyps californianus) near Big Sur a few weeks ago:

Here is how she described her experience:

Sunday was a real remarkable day. 6 or 7 condors soaring over the cliffs, water and roosting on a luxury home south of Nepenthe.  We also at the same time had a pod of dolphin below us .  It was unreal.  They were so close I couldn’t believe my eyes and almost fell down a cliff I got too close to.  It was a good day.

Wish I had been there!  Go check out more Multi-Vultural Awareness at The Ethical Palaeontologist, Earth Wind and Water, and Swamp Things.

And my own thoughts on this most beautiful bird here.

Pepsis wasp in the Eastern Sierra – 4.0 on the Schmidt Pain Index.

Phoebis sennae metamorphosis video produced by timelapse videographer extraordinaire JCMegabyte.

In a dream last night, I sprinkled water on a dried out, old mantis ootheca which I had given up as spent or dead.  Miraculously, nymphs began rapelling miniature but almost fully-formed from the papery husk.

Nabokov's annotated first page of Kafka's Metamorphosis.

The butterfly expert V. Nabokov surmised that the monstrous unclean animal of Kafka’s imagination was most probably a very large beetle, and certainly not a cockroach as commonly assumed.  I am inclined to agree with him not only on the morphological grounds from which he argues but also for the fact that that cockroaches like mantids (which are essentially toned, insecticidal roaches) and bugs and grasshoppers and sucking lice are hemimetabolous.  They do not metamorphose.  Or as the convential parlance has it their metamorphosis is “incomplete.”

Though form does change from instar to instar to imago in the hemimetabolous orders, these changes are more or less subtle – an increase in body size a subtle change in shape or color the growth of wings.  Dragonflies are hemimetabolous desipite their dramatic transformation from killer submarine to muderous biplane – the shadow of the naiad can be seen in imago with some imagination.

True (“complete”) metamorphosis is a trick reserved for the endopterygotes – butterflies and bees and beetles, flies and fleas and ants and ant lions &c.  Each of these groups begins life as a wormy larva hardens into a mummylike pupa in which the body tissues literally digest themselves and build an entirely new, wonderful thing not at all like the melted maggot or caterpillar from which it precipitated.

It is much, much easier to imagine the maggoty Gregor metamorphosing into a beetle than a cockroach.

All of which is a wholly unnecessary preamble to THE MOST, most bizarre scientific papers I have read all year: weirder than hermit eurypterid hand puppets, stranger than penguin poop from space, more fantastic than plastic barnacle penes, and more incredible, even, than psychic protists.

I’m speaking of course of Donald Williamson’s mind-bending new paper in PNAS: ” Caterpillars evolved from onychophorans by hybridogenesis. ” (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908357106).

Without, it seems, a single piece of empirical data to support his claim, Williamson posits that the larval stages of holometabolous insects (and other animals which undergo dramatic post-larval transformations) evolved via “Larval Transfer” when insects mated with velvet worms! Butterflies (and beetles, and flies &c.) are, in this view sort of sequential transphyletic chimera. This is something like, well a human mating with a cockroach which then gives birth to a human that then eventually metamorphoses into a cockroach.  Or something.

While this is an, ahem, iconoclastic proposition to say the least, and it is fairly astonishing that it appears in one of the most prestigious general science journals, Williamson at least proposes a “research program” to test his hypothesis.  Here is one experiment he proposes:

As an initial trial, it should be possible to attach an onychophoran spermatophore to the genital pore of a female cockroach and see if fertilized eggs are laid (page 4 from Williamson 2009)

This is like some awesome Dr. Moreau style shite.  The entire paper is sort of like a Lynch film: wonderful and horrifying and you’re not sure if it’s some kind of put on or there is some kind of insane genius at work.

The back story; and some choice quotes expressing the astonishment with which this paper has been received by the uh, “mainstream” scientific community is covered in this Scientific American article.

But. Dude.  Seriously?

Normal fautling. Dolomite rising. Some plants get old. Plenty old, but not so old really. Large ooids. Treeline ebbs and grows. Jays about. Dust blows up. A helicopter, a dusty Oregon van. Mount Darwin on the horizon.

Kestrels.  Man with camera clinking across the outcrop.

Deer season pends. Dudes on the ridge, scout. “He looks Indian, maybe he is just communing with nature.” September comes.