Non-Tweetle Beetle Battle

Nicholas Wade at the NYT has a nice article about the often extravagant results of sexual selection, which as accompanied by a beautiful slide show of beetle horns. Worth a look!

Why am I reading the NYT science section during work hours? Because I have to do something educational while I wait for my full system restore on my workstation to complete (recovering from a tragically failed upgrade to Fedora 10 x86_64 from Fedora 8).

Cephalopods, Old and New

PZ Myers at Pharyngula discusses some spectacularly preserved 95 million year old fossil octupuses from Lebanon. Although superficially similar to modern octopuses in external appearance (8 tentacles and all that stuff) the structure of the their gladius (the remnant of the molluscan shell) is intermediate between older cephalopods and modern octopuses.


Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science discusses what the stomach contents of Sperm Whales can tell us about large deep-sea squid (including Giant Squid) and octupuses. ¹³C to ¹²C isotope ratios in the undigested squid/octopus beaks tell you about the depth at which the animals live, while ¹⁵N to ¹⁴N ratios tell you its position on the food chain.

[Image of scientists examining whale stomach contents from a whale that stranded itself come from Karen Evans's web page.]

Why subsidizing Solar power makes sense

George Musser defends himself against claims that he is a "freeloader" for installing state-subsidized Solar panels on his home over at SciAm.

I wonder if the reader who accused him of being a freeloader also calls farmers, or the coal and oil industry, freeloaders as they are also very heavily subsidized by the taxpayer?

Sustainability

SciAm has a short but interesting article by Michael Lemonick on the "Top 10 Myths about Sustainability":

• Myth 1: Nobody knows what sustainability really means.
• Myth 2: Sustainability is all about the environment.
• Myth 3: “Sustainable” is a synonym for “green.”
• Myth 4: It’s all about recycling.
• Myth 5: Sustainability is too expensive.
• Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living.
• Myth 7: Consumer choices and grassroots activism, not government intervention, offer the fastest, most efficient routes to sustainability.
• Myth 8: New technology is always the answer.
• Myth 9: Sustainability is ultimately a population problem.
• Myth 10: Once you understand the concept, living sustainably is a breeze to figure out.

[Trash image from: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/129/319298351_724779cb39_b.jpg]

Please go Galt.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings urges conservatives to do what they've started threatening to do: go Galt. I wish they would.

Hilzoy expresses (mock) puzzlement that none of them seem to have acted on the beliefs they're so eager insist are correct, rational and "objective". Its pretty obvious why they only threaten to go Galt, but never do so.

If they all did go Galt society would continue as well if not better than before, so the glorious social experiment would only serve to demolish the sophomoric fantasy they use to justify their greed and lack of compassion.

OSX Leopard: What is the /home directory for?

What is the /home directory in OSX 10.5 for? It appears to be:

1. Empty.
2. Created or last modified when the machine last booted up, with user.group of root.wheel (this differs from /Users which is root.admin).
   
3. Impossible to copy to, even as root. You just get "Input/output error".

I was trying to change the default user home directory location on my Macbook from /Users/<username> to /home/<username>, so as match Linux and simply rsyncing between my linux boxes and the macbook, using one of the following methods described on macosxhints (1 , 2 ). (They were not trying to use /home but move the home directories to a separate volume.)

I can't find any mention of "/home" and OSX anywhere on the web, and leaving off the / just gives articles talking about /Users/. BSD seems to use /home (just like a sensible *nix), so I doubt its a BSD versus Linux thing.

Macports?

I see scipy is available under Macports. Doubt is setting in. Maybe I shouldn't have gone with fink.