my 8 yr old likes to play with her breakfast

My daughters have taken over some of my ancient and ragged comics from the early seventies, and browsing one of the them I noticed an ad that fascinated me as a kid.  132 raging Romans, snarling at each other's throats, for only $1.98!  Never did send away for them (by the time I rated an allowance my interests had moved on I guess.  I would love to see what actually came in the mail.  132 pieces of something I guess.

Link: First Asian genome sequenced : Nature News.

This time Dawkins takes on New Age mumbo jumbo. 

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turtle on the surface, originally uploaded by bluewavechris.

beautiful underwater photos from bluewavechris

Some friends of mine caught this show and said The Police seemed a bit off.   Stewart Copeland seems to think so too, as he makes clear on his blog.  Mistakes, ad libs, and digressions make a live show.  No lip synched perfection for me.  I love his insider’s view of the show:

OUR FIRST DISASTER GIG!.

Andy has started the opening guitar riff to MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE and the crowd is going nuts. Problem is, I missed hearing him start. Is he on the first time around or the second? I look over at Sting and he’s not much help, his cue is me – and I’m lost. Never mind. “Crack!” on the snare and I’m in, so Sting starts singing. Problem is, he heard my crack as two in the bar, but it was actually four – so we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho.
Well we are professionals so we soon get sorted, but the groove is eluding us. We crash through MESSAGE and then go strait into SYNCHRONICITY. But there is just something wrong. We just can’t get on the good foot. We shamble through the song and hit the big ending. Last night Sting did a big leap for the cut-off hit, and he makes the same move tonight, but he gets the footwork just a little bit wrong and doesn’t quite achieve lift-off. The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock. Never Mind. Next song is going to be great…
But it isn’t. We get to the end of the first verse and I snap into the chorus groove – and Sting doesn’t. He’s still in the verse. We’ll have to listen to the tapes tomorrow to see who screwed up, but we are so off kilter that Sting counts us in to begin the song again. This is ubeLIEVably lame. We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea.
And so it goes, for song after song. All I can think about is how Dietmar is going to string us up. In rehearsal this afternoon we changed the keys of EVERY LITTLE THING and DON’T STAND SO CLOSE so needless to say Andy and Sting are now on-stage in front of twenty thousand fans playing avant-garde twelve-tone hodgepodges of both tunes. Lost, lost, lost.

Last week it seemed like hit pieces were popping up everywhere on Rachel Carson.  Deltoid has been doing a yeoman’s job of documenting the atrocities.  He can add this little screed by Margaret Wente to the pile.   Why now?, I wondered as I counted the errors in Wente’s piece.  Now I know of course that her 100th birthday just passed and this seems to have provoked a predictable round of calumnies form the denialist industry about her supposed  responsibility for malarial deaths arising from restricted use of DDT.  I can’t add much to the light shed on the issue by Deltoid.  I lived in Indonesia for a number of years and they regularly sprayed DDT to suppress malaria. I had always understood that the bans on DDT were for agricultural use only, not for combatting insect-borne illness.  Deltoid also rightly points out that banning agricultural use of DDT likely delayed the evolution of DDT-resistant mosquitoes, thereby saving lives.

Today Kevin Drum covers it as well:

Is DDT a banned substance? Answer: for widespread
agricultural use, which produces increased resistance in many insect
populations, yes. For vector control (primarily to contain
mosquito-borne malaria), no.

For the last decade or so, however, a group of right-wing "sound
science" advocates has been implying that the agricultural ban on DDT
is really a blanket ban and that millions of poor Africans have died as
a result. Why? DDT isn’t patented and is only minimally profitable, so
it’s not as if the DDT industry is bothering to push this. So who is?

Short answer: the tobacco industry. Surprise! Turns out that the DDT
disinformation campaign was really an effort to discredit the World
Health Organization, which was planning a major anti-smoking initiative
back in 1998. Discredit WHO on malaria, and you discredit WHO on its
anti-smoking activism. And all the while you get to look like you’re
standing up for millions of impoversished black Africans. Neat, eh?

In my view this is also about discrediting the scientific consensus on climate change.  The argument being that we listened to the crazy environmentalists about DDT and millions died, and now they are leading us down the same path with the climate change "myth".

Actually there are 2 Phycodurus eques in the picture. Photographed last week at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps. Sorry for the poor quality image but I have not got the knack of taking pictures through glass. I heartily recommend visiting the aquarium if you are in the La Jolla area. The Sea of Genes exhibit is particularly interesting.

iTunes on shuffle just found Billy Bragg’s version of Jerusalem. This hymn has always moved me. Along with the lyrics, Wikipedia led me to some things I didn’t know about Blake’s poem, later set to music.

And did those feet in ancient time:

    And did those feet in ancient time,
    Walk upon Englands mountains green:
    And was the holy Lamb of God,
    On Englands pleasant pastures seen !

    And did the Countenance Divine,
    Shine forth upon our clouded hills ?
    And was Jerusalem builded here,
    Among these dark Satanic Mills ?

    Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
    Bring me my Arrows of desire:
    Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
    Bring me my Chariot of fire !

    I will not cease from Mental Fight,
    Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
    Till we have built Jerusalem,
    In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Nevertheless, the poem – little known during the century which followed its writing – was included in a patriotic anthology of verse published in 1916, a time when morale had begun to decline due to the high number of casualties in the First World War and the perception that there was no end in sight.
Under these circumstances, it seemed to many to define what Britain was fighting for. Therefore, Parry was asked to put it to music at a Fight for Right campaign meeting in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The most famous version was orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar in 1922 for the Leeds Festival. Upon hearing the orchestral version for the first time, King George V said that he preferred that “Jerusalem” replace “God Save The King” as the National Anthem.
This is considered to be England’s most popular patriotic song, often being used as an alternative national anthem. It was used as a campaign slogan by the Labour Party in the 1945 UK general election. (Clement Attlee said they would build “a new Jerusalem”). “Jerusalem” is the unofficial anthem of the British Women’s Institute, and historically was used by the National Union of Suffrage Societies.[3]
The text of the poem was inspired by an apocryphal story which narrated that Jesus, while still a young man, accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to the English town of Glastonbury. Blake’s biographers note that he believed in the legend; however, the poem’s theme or subtext is subject to much sharper debate, probably accounting for its popularity across the philosophical spectrum. As a Romanticist paean the poem has come under criticism. Consequently some see it as unsuitable as an English National Anthem, and its reference to a foreign city as puzzling to other nations. It is unlikely that Blake intended such a literal interpretation, however, or that most who sing and love the song believe in such a literal reading of the lyrics; legends contain important truths to many people.

How about that?  And here is Billy: