Ninety nine million years ago a dinosaur got its tail stuck in the sap. Then, in 2016, someone noticed some interesting stuff in the amber at a Myanmar amber market. The pictures of dinosaur feathers are great--and they show a flowchart of feather evolution, and where these feathers fit in.  So cool.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/jaw-on-the-floor-entire-chunk-of-feathered-dinosaur-discovered-in-amber/

I know nothing of it and just watched it for the first time. This is the Kokoro dance. Not safe for work due to nudity, however, it is nonsexual. ( Cut for suggestive image on youtube window.Collapse )

Pesticides, etc.
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True story, just happened, 6:49am. Kitten just came muttering into my bed. She let out her little vibrato meow and I reached over sleepily to pet her hello. My hand landed on something wet. I let out a howl of disgust, thinking it was a dead mouse. She jumped down out of the bed, and then on the bedroom floor something went crunch. I turned on the light, and there was a spot of bright red blood and a few gray feathers on my white bedspread. I looked down at the kitten, and she was hunched over, eating the bird. Crunch, crunch, crunch, methodically. I laid back down and listened. Then I got up, to get a rag so that I could get the blood out of the carpet. By the time I got back the kitten had finished eating the bird, and was crunching on dried cat food. There was nothing left but a small pile of tail feathers that moved in the wind I created. No blood on the carpet, but the down comforter has a new spot. There's a drizzle of blood on her white chest.

This is really cool.

Monday today, and there was so much snow in Portland that businesses were closed. People have been cooped up for long enough that today they got bold, dug out their boots and winter coats, and headed out. Cabin fever makes people especially silly. Myself, I went cross country skiing with neighbor Larry. We skied over to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and skied down to the Wilamette river. It was low and slow and quiet. Then we skied along the back trail toward Sellwood, and out onto the open grassy marsh where the birds hang out. The stream was frozen and the wind had swept the snow around, so the surface was flat and not too deep...very nice skiing. We unfortunately disturbed a group of SEVEN great blue herons that were holed up out there in the grass. When we got too close they took off as a group, six flying downstream and one flying upstream. We were sorry to disturb them, but pleased to see them.

Up on the hill we could see the crematorium. It is getting a new paint job. Somebody is painting various birds on the ugly cement building. It is pretty cool.

My computer seems to be on the fritz after I got greedy ripping music from Suzanne's CD's. It shuts down randomly and without warning. So I am cutting this post short. HOpe you are having a good winter!

The Flu of 1918 and the Politics of Flu in Current Times
Notes for oral presentation, 3/19/08, paper to follow
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Last night I *finally* finished reading this book: Flu; The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. The last third of the book was less interesting to me than the first part. It followed the stories of many assorted researchers who were trying to recover live virus from bits of frozen bodies that had been buried in the permafrost layer of the northern tundra, or bits of viral genes from samples of lung tissue that had been saved in blocks of parafin by military doctors.
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