My favorite gift this Christmas was this T-shirt from my wife. As I opened the package, for a brief moment, I thought she’d given me a cheap T-shirt. When I realized what is was, I died laughing. I’ll definitely be wearing this on my first day of grad school.

And finally, if you have no idea what this is or why it’s funny, this must be your first time here.

Go here to learn all about the flying spaghetti monster. It’s a very poignant satire on the scientific validity of intelligent design.

Lake Tawakoni fall foliage

One of the challenges I deal with when blogging is how to share more personal things. I’m obviously blogging to a general audience bigger than just family or friends, but I know that a lot of my readers are family and friends (especially since I haven’t been blogging long). I will occasionally blog about things that may be of interest to the narrower audience of those who know me. This also gives me a case to showcase my pictures, a hobby I enjoy.

I went birding the day after Christmas with my wife and mom to Lake Tawakoni east of Dallas. The weather was incredible. In the 60s and 70s. The trees looked like New England in the fall. (Okay, maybe that’s a stretch, but for Texas they were quite colorful). In short, this was definitely not the kind of weather one expects in late December.

The highlight of the day was Rusty Blackbird. I’ve never seen one before, and there are very few birds in Texas that I haven’t seen.

I’ve put up a few pictures for those interested.

Then this post is for you. Olduvai George, one of the blogs that I read, has detailed the process that he uses to paint. He uses Photoshop and a drawing tablet. He goes through the steps of creating a Mastodon. It’s amazing to watch the crude line drawings take shape into the finished work.

I’ve posted about this blog before, but if you haven’t bookmarked or RSS’d it, do yourself a favor and do that now!

When we think of big animals, we often think of things that lived long ago. Turns out, the largest animal to have ever lived — either past or present — is with us today.

The blue whale, (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest animal to have ever lived. It weighs in at an astonishingly heavy 100 tons, distributed over a length of 100 feet! That’s a weight of one ton per foot. They’re so big, there’s room for 50 people to stand on their tongue. Their heart is the size of a small car, like a VW bug. Baby blue whales drink 100 gallons of milk a day and can gain 200 pounds every 24 hours. Yes, that’s how big this animal is.

Bluish-gray above and paler below, their skin is mottled with white. Their flippers are 9 to 12 feet long, and their dorsal fin is greatly reduced. Read the rest of this entry »

The Night Before Christmas? Or Transitional Species in Insect Evolution?

I came across the latter last night, and I found it fascinating. The author of this blog has summarized the discussion of cockroach and termite evolution taken from a new book, Evolution of the Insects by David Grimaldi and Michael S. Engel. (Hey, it’s never too late for a belated Christmas gift. Contact me if you need my address for where to mail the book.)

The article was really interesting. Basically, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that termites evolved directly from cockroaches. In fact, it appears that termites are literally modified cockroaches.

I learned some pretty nifty things too. For example, there are wood eating cockroaches today (who knew!), which have the same (and closely related) gut flora (bacteria and protists) as termites. These little critters, essential for digesting wood, are passed down in the anal secretions which the young eat (pictures included at the link!). There are also termites which look very similar to roaches, sharing a number of their characteristics.

Kind of makes you rethink that whole phrase, “not a creature was stirring…”

Having thoroughly enjoyed the trial in Dover, and squeezed it for all it’s worth in my blogging, I wanted to share what’s coming up here at Ocellated. Perhaps not much.

Today I leave for Christmas with family. Will I blog? Depends. Do my aunt and uncle have wireless high speed internet or even a second phone line they don’t mind being tied up? If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know why.

I’ve also got a post coming up that speaks directly about theology and how I integrate it with my views on science. I got an email from a friend who’s a theologian, and he asked some questions. Now biologists often cringe (or worse) when Christians speak up on biology. Perhaps a few Christians will cringe when the reverse happens? Either way, it’ll be a good opportunity for me to speak directly about my faith, something I need to be coaxed to do at times. (I’m like that mouse in a sherman trap… The questions about faith sound so easy. I just don’t realize their oats on a loaded spring plate, with a steel door behind me.)

I’m also going to be moving to San Angelo, TX the week after Christmas, in preparation to begin grad school in a few weeks. Even when I get moved in, it may be a couple of days before I can get internet access up and running in the place.

What all this means is that my blogging may suffer. But have no fear. I will return!

In the meantime, if you’re bored and need something to do, go look for theistic evolution (or evolutionary creationist) blogs and send me the link. Surely I’m not the only one out in the blogosphere, and I’d like to know of others.

But how can you know that?

This is just too cool. Tara Smith over at Aetiology has a post about a paper that appeared in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. The authors analyzed the DNA in the pulp cavity of teeth from soldiers remains unearthed in a mass grave.

Their conclusion:

Our results show that louse-borne infectious diseases affected nearly one-third of Napoleon’s soldiers buried in Vilnius and indicate that these diseases might have been a major factor in the French retreat from Russia.

Read her post to learn more. This is the kind of science that’s truely amazing.

As those of you who know me well know, I generally just don’t get all that excited about Christmas. It’s a time when commercialism runs rampant, Christians behave badly (war on Christmas?), and all kinds of religous and secular things get mixed in ways that make me shiver. Everyone I know, my beloved wife included, completely disagree with me and are determined to give me some Christmas spirit.

I did come across something recently that’s just downright cool though. A guy has programmed his Christmas lights to play in sync with music, which he puts out through a low power FM broadcast. (You tune in through your car’s radio, and watch the show).

To see the lights, visit this website here. You’ll need Windows media player, and if you’re on a slow connection, it might take a minute for the video to download.

Also, if you’re ever the skeptic and wonder if this is actually real, as I did, you can read about this display over at Yahoo! News. Update, the Yahoo! story is gone, but ABC News also has the story here.

Bah-Humbug.

Sure everybody knows about giraffes. We’ve seen them since we were three years old and had at least one or two of the things as stuffed animals growing up. But did you know there is one other animal placed in the same family as Giraffes? (The family is appropriately named Giraffidae). This animal of the week highlights the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), the much more obscure relative to the familiar giraffe.

Okapi’s are interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, they weren’t known to science until an expedition organized by British explorer Harry Johnston discovered them in 1901. (Like many things not know to science, local people knew of their existance.) That story alone is an interesting one. Reports started coming out of Africa in 1890 of the creature, and Johnson set out to discover them some ten years later. He sent back partial pieces of the animal’s hide to Britain, where scientists prematurely announced the discovery of a new species of zebra. Read the rest of this entry »

MSNBC had a very interesting article today on a gene that has been identified that partially explains skin color in humans. They stumbled across this while looking for cancer genes in zebrafish, which come in a natural darker form and a human bred, lighter, golden form.

Then the scientists identified the human version of the gene, which has two main types — a version shared by Africans and East Asians, and a slightly different variant carried by nearly all Europeans. The researchers went on to show that this gene is partly responsible for light human skin in Europeans. This study appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

What’s interesting is the conclusion that it was a very small change to our genetic code which led to humans having very pale pigmentation, such as Europeans have.

It also pointed out that we still have much to learn, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit when science figures it out.

Why so many Europeans have one particular version of this gene is not yet clear. It is possible that the SLC24A5 version [of the gene] now seen in nearly all Europeans may have been useful for some specific reason and swept through a human population that gave rise to Europeans.

This new research does not conclusively explain why light skin might have been favored among Europeans, but the work is consistent with the longstanding but unproven hypothesis suggesting that light skin allows more absorption of the ultraviolet rays in sunshine that are necessary for making the essential vitamin D. Such a trait could have been favored at European latitudes.

The SLC24A5 gene, however, cannot explain all the differences in skin color in humanity. For example, Asians and Africans have the same version of the gene but quite different skin tones. More research will likely uncover other pieces of the genetic puzzle of human skin color.