10:04 – Costco run with Paul and Mary yesterday, followed by dinner. The safety officer for Mary’s company is retiring, and Mary has been appointed to serve that role. As she says, this following a week in which their lab facility experienced an earthquake and a hurricane. Not to mention a plague of locusts.
Colin’s pictures will appear in the biology lab book, in the chapter on genetics and inheritance. This image of Colin at 10 weeks old shows him with full drop ears, a common (and genetically dominant) form.
This image shows Colin at 28 weeks old, by which time his ears have assumed their final fully-erect (prick) form.
I’m using these images to illustrate two ear forms, one dominant and one recessive, and tightly-cropped head shots of these two images in a table to illustrate what puppies a breeding pair of Border Collies with different ear traits can be expected to have. (Colin’s parents are both flip/drop-eared, which means they’re both dominant-recessive with respect to prick ears. If they had eight puppies, which they did, one would expect on average two of those puppies to have prick ears, which was indeed the result.)
16:01 – Geez. I just alerted Jerry Coyne to a free science book deal on Amazon, and almost forgot to tell my own readers about it. The book is Eugene V. Koonin’s The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution. It’s regularly priced at $69.99, print or Kindle, and is currently on sale for $0.00 for Kindle. If you’re interested in this subject, grab while the grabbing is good, because these sales often last 24 hours or less.
Finally got around to shooting a video with my Olympus E5 still camera. I was actually quite surprised at the quality. I was in open sun, about 97 degrees. After about 5 minutes the sensor got hot and I had to stop and let it cool. Video is probably not as good as a dedicated video camera but it is good to know I have it if I suddenly have to video tape some police that are abusing their power.
Wakesurfing Video
I tried using the Anchor tage to see if the link would embed properly. If it doesn’t I am open to some advice.
Well, that did not work as I wound up with a relative reference. So let me try again with an absolute reference.
Wakesurfing video with absolute link
Let me try again.
Crap, I give up. Here is the link.
http://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/WakeSurf_1.wmv
Copy and paste if you want to see the video.
Just got the book. Still free as of this writing in the US.
“If you’re interested in this subject, grab while the grabbing is good, because these sales often last 24 hours or less.”
Click!
I <3 Amazon 1 Click ®!
I saw that book listed this morning and didn’t follow up then. At the time I wasn’t sure if it was a real science book or one of the pretend science religious books, and didn’t have time to check. Thanks for the pointer!
I tend to grab anything free and technical that I might be interested in – one of the advantages of ebooks is they don’t take up shelf space so why not? (Who knows, someday I might even buy a Kindle.)
Wow. When I think back on how a 200 pound studio camera could not get pictures that good 20 years ago, it is kind of like those stories of my grandfather travelling by horse as a kid, by car as a young man, and eventually flying across the ocean to visit his war bride’s family in Belgium as a grown man with grandchildren.
I noticed that my spam folder at Gmail is almost always near empty these days. When we were in Berlin, I used to have a series of things I did to get ready for the next week, including copying our latest podcasts for the commute, and–emptying our spam folders. There would often be 200 to 300 items in there, and occasionally a real email that should not have been there, once or twice including some email from my boss.
It has been months since I remembered to look at the spam folder, as my current boss and I communicate via phone and email, so there is a double-check on potential lost email.
When I logged on last week, I think there were about 8 messages in the spam folder. There should have been 5 or 6 hundred. Just logged on now and found only 4 spam messages–one of them real email. Got to get back to the weekly routine.
Wonder what has changed that there are so very few in the spam folder these days?
I have a question: while I can see the free ebooks on Amazon, on their website all the “Today’s Deals” seem not to be books. Bob (or someone else who knows): where did you learn about this special?
And yes, I’ve downloaded it. Evolution is an interest of mine. And at $0.00 if the book turns out not to be worthwhile (unlikely, with Bob’s recommendation) I’m only out some time, and I trust myself to pick junk science from real science pretty damn quick. (Science has been added to Politics as a topic Not To Be Discussed at family dinners. :-()
It’s not that I recommend the book. I haven’t read it, nor anything else by the author. In fact, when I emailed Jerry Coyne I asked him if he had an opinion on the book or the author. He said he hadn’t read the book, but that the author was familiar to him and the book looked from the description to be worthwhile.
Bob (or someone else who knows): where did you learn about this special?
http://ireaderreview.com/
Somewhere they have an option to get email notifications, which I have.
Yes, that’s what I use as well. There are several similar sites, including (I think) Kindle Boards.
It’s not that I recommend the book. I haven’t read it, nor anything else by the author.
My apologies for misconstruing what you wrote. With however many of us having downloaded it, someone will surely mention if it’s any good or not. Of course I expect most of us have “to read” piles (real or virtual 🙂 of considerable size!