Perseids against the Milky Way, Sigh

The Perseids are reliable, regular shooting stars, a meteor shower that shows up nights in late July every year.  I didn’t see the Perseids this year myself because Baltimore’s skies are a rich carnelian haze that hold nothing much and certainly not meteorites.  And Heather didn’t see them because, she thinks, of light pollution.  To […]

Us, From Far Away

This is a photograph — meaning, it’s real — taken from 114 million miles away on the far side of the sun.  The brightest little dot in the lower left is the earth.  The less bright dot near it is our moon.  Click on it:  it almost makes you cry.

Bug/Blog/Bunfight

I thought I’d made the case against parasitic wasps with evidence and eloquence.  I thought that would be the end of it.  But no:  counter-arguments were made (even if insects did evolve first, Josie, I can still feel superior), gauntlets thrown down, aspersions cast (you think I didn’t notice “delicate flower,” Heather?), and lines drawn […]

Abstruse Goose: the Creation, Part 2

Abstruse Goose says:  The following sentence is false.  The preceding sentence is true. Then he adds:  The title text is true. He’s toying with us, isn’t he. Credit: http://abstrusegoose.com/244

Evolution & Revulsion

I was going about life one day, visiting my step-daughter the entomologist who showed me, in a microscope, a pale green little aphid which was eating a leaf.  Inside the aphid was a tiny parasitic wasp which was eating the aphid.  Through the aphid’s transparent body, I could see the wasp’s buggy little eyes.  I […]

Newly-Evolved Hybrid

On July 28, 2010, nearly 900,000 galaxies were put into a public database, and this is Galaxy #1, or SDSS J000000.41-102225.6, and don’t tell me astronomers don’t know how to name things.   Galaxy #1 is probably an elliptical; the rest of the 900,000 are either ellipticals or spirals or something else, and were identified as […]

Abstruse Goose: Creation

Probably not God’s fault, but very few people understand that business of hidden dimensions in string theory. http://abstrusegoose.com/235