We’re not in the same game, I know, but in the Über-game that is the modern blog, Neddie has just wiped the floor with not just me but everyone else as well. Go read Urban Legends for a Post-Social-Network-Analysis Age, but not with a beverage in your mouth.

Just go and read Neil Shubin's essay over on John Brockman’s Edge site.

The take-home message of this essay is a simple one: The transition of animals from water to land in the Devonian period, 370 million years ago, was profoundly important in one sense and entirely trivial in another. It had...

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One of the nice things about blog carnivals like [Tangled Bank]http://monado2.blogspot.com/2006/05/tangled-bank-53-go-climb-tree.html is that they expose you to new voices that might otherwise remain unheard. Bankelele in Nairobi is one such. Being a banker, most of his posts are about banking a...

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Mayday on Ischia, the bigger island that shares the Bay of Naples with the death-inducing Capri and sundry other rocks, for a long weekend. Stunning, simply stunning. Bad weather on day 1 didn’t matter much, as we spent most of it up to our necks in hot water at one of the many thermal baths. The...

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I've been getting into a gentle tizz over at Botany Photo of the Day and The Human Flower Project¹ on the subject of names. Latin names. OK, go ahead and mock; most people do. But the fact is that, pace Wittgenstein, names do have meaning inasmuch as they allow us, in the absence of the thing itself, potentially to agree on what that thing is.

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