I may regret this, but having learned to spread little goodies to followers through Google Reader, I thought I would send them back here to The Mother Ship. Over there, below the Random Photograph. To do that, however, I have to make them available to all and sundry, rather than just to my friends a...

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Here's a nice, sprightly, startling lede from the review of a new book about pandas.

It is one of the more startling revelations in Henry Nicholls’s sprightly history that we still have no idea how many giant pandas there are currently living in the wild. Fewer than 2,000? More than 4,000? Perh...

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I was momentarily distracted while listening to Lord Bragg on Women in Enlightment Science trying to recall whether I had ever seen the famed double-portrait of the Lavoisiers. So as soon as I got to the desktop I went looking, and I don't believe I had. My original intention had been to just ni...

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The wonderful brouhaha over the idiocy at Cooks Source ¹ shows no signs of dying down. For new readers, a foolish editor at Cooks Source -- described by the Washington Post as “a formerly obscure food magazine based in Sunderland, Mass.” -- stole an article from the internet, offered a less th...

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Friend Derek's website is so bleedin’ cool ¹ that I have to have this discussion on my own premises. I’m not even sure it’ll work, but here goes.

In a recent daily ² he notes that:

¢ 1 cosa non mi riCordo menTioned in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ... is the i...

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