i had been noticing 'buzz' on various geektastic blogs about fossil evidence for a cephalopod (octopus/squid-type thingie) bigger than a giant squid....we're talking mega-squid.  i finally tracked down the reference for it and it was a major wtf(?) moment:  is there real evidence like maybe fossilized sucker-hooks?  no.   how about fossilized beak?  no.  internal shell (a pen)?  no.  the authors, a married team from Mount Holyoke College in MA, 'hypothesize' that this doubleplus huge cephalopod existed because in a fossil bed in Nevada, 9 ichthyosaur skeletons appear 'juxtaposed' and the authors hypothesize that these fossils comprise a midden like some contemporary octopussies keep.   better still, since the skeletons are disarticulated and arranged and cephalopods have humongous brains and are quite intelligent then this ancient cephalopod was intelligent enough to arrange the carcasses of its kill 'artistically' in a self-portrait.
  i.   shit.   you.   not. 

here's a direct quote:

"The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in biserial patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle. The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each amphicoelous vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. Thus the tessellated vertebral disc pavement may represent the earliest known self‑portrait."  [emphases mine].

i submit a counter-hypothesis, them space-folks from Planet Neptune  who keep kidnapping and butt-diddlin' white-trash are the ones who did all that arranging and decorating!!  they've run out of ichthyosaurs and switched their artistic medium to 'crop-circles.'

a week or so ago, i first noticed the goldenrod (Solidago spp.) has begun blooming.  traditionally, this is a sign that autumn weather is iminent; first-frost within 6 or so weeks.  year before last, it was nearly ten weeks after the goldenrod bloomed that first-frost came.  i wonder if global-warming had anything to do with this bit of folk-wisdom becoming just folk-lore....i do look forward to a crispness in the air.  although i'm very well-churched, i'm still sufficiently pagan to enjoy the deliciousness of crisp night-air on warm skin....i've a very fond memory of dancing naked around a bonfire with some Radical Faeries....they were celebrating Samhain...i was just celebrating running around a bonfire nekkid with some other nekkid mens.  unfortunately, lots of folks blame the goldenrod for their autumnal allergy problems....the pollen of goldenrod is heavy and sticks to itself--it has spines for this---the pollen is not well wind-dispersed and insects are the primary pollinators for the plant.  the pollen that raises so much sinus-hell is from ragweed (Ambrosia spp.) which bloom at the same time as goldenrod.  it used to be that every stand of goldenrod thundered with the heavy drone of honeybees, bumblebees, and carpenter-bees.  now, the stands of goldenrod are fairly quiet......i watched a single bumblebee with her saddle-bags bursting with the gold pollen....i wonder if she wondered where the army of her sisters was.....if bacteria can count their number in a colony, i would be surprised that bees could not do it.  bees are often symbolic of resurrection in art; hopefully, the symbolism won't be empty and we'll be thick with them again.....and soon.



ok, yesterday's pity-party is over.  have tons to get ready for the Oktoberfest celebration at the coffee-shop.  as resident coffee-shop philosopher, i've a ton of philosophizin' to do.   just for shits and giggles, i put up a personal advertisement on OKCupid.   oy, what evils in a past-life have i committed!?!?   some of the 'matches' were bad enough for me to consider tracking down someone and whuppin' 'em.   tho', the molecular entomologist was kind of........."intriguing" to say the least.   as usual, the ones that seem worth engaging with are too far away.  *sigh*  i think it'd be neat to discuss the problems that humans would have if, like some armored scale insects, humans had 20+ sexes, or like the clam shrimp, had 3 'sexes,' or consider Tetrahymena which has 7,  or like Schizophyllum communae, had > 25,000 sexes.

another of my personal saints has spoken!

i truly miss my local independent bookstores.  i do buy too much from Amazon.com but living in the boonies with no local bookstores and a gutted public library system, the Amazon.com has become almost a necessity for me (my friend FatCat and i DO make book-buying trips to "the big cities.")   i admit that i've been tempted by the Kindle devices but i worry that i won't have the experience of 'diving into' a text without the sensual input of having the book in hand.  secondly, the portability is very very intriguing BUT i'm quite absent-minded (pudding-brained) and am prone to misplacing things like books, cellphones, and keyrings.  i'm not rich enough to be blase' about misplacing an electronic device that cost enough money that i could have purchased 20-30 books for that amount (or one good technical book....i'm saving the beer-can money for Jessup Shively's Complex Intracellular Structures in Prokaryotes which is a bargain at $183.20 + s.&h.   last time i looked!)

This photo was released by ALMA which is a joint international project to build a vast array of millimeter/submillimeter radio telescopes in the Chilean Andes.  only 19 scopes are online but eventually the array will have an additional 66 telescopes by 2013.  the array will be 11 miles wide when complete.  The image shows 2 spiral galaxies colliding........they're called the Antennae galaxies because there are 2 massive plumes of material projecting from the nuclei that resemble the antennae of insects.  they are in the constellation The Crow (Corvus)[called . Nán Fāng Zhū Què or "The Vermillion Bird of the South" by the Chinese].   the thing that is truly humbling is this image is showing how the universe was.....the "light" used to "see" these colliding galaxies has taken more than 40 million years to reach the Earth.  pretty nifty....and kind of spooky as hell when you stop to think about it.  (it takes about 8 minutes for a ray of sunshine from our sun to reach Earth).