inkbluesky

Daisy real or photoshop 1600×1200

The question probably isn’t constructed correctly, better is the photo natural or a clever natural looking composition. I’m tending to think the original was staged and the resulting photo enhanced in Photoshop.

Sir David Attenborough looks at the ‘aquatic ape hypothesis’

The hypothesis proposes that the physical characteristics that distinguish us from our nearest cousin apes - standing and moving bipedally, being naked and sweaty, our swimming and diving abilities, fat babies, big brains and language - all of these and others are best explained as adaptations to a prolonged period of our evolutionary history being spent in and around the seashore and lake margins, not on the hot dry savannah or in the forest with the other apes. The programmes explore the varieties of response to the theory, from when it was first proposed to the present day. Why it is seen by many as a very provoking idea and at the accumulating evidence of recent years that seems to be tipping the mainstream towards assimilating many of the AAH proposals. Programme two ends with dramatic new biological evidence suggesting that water-birthing was a very early human evolutionary adaptation.

There are recordings at the link you can listen to. I used to watch his Sir David’s specials on PBS and always thought he did a wonderful job of making science accessible.

50 Easy Questions to Ask Any Republican

Evolution of the Buddha Image

This pictures are oriented more toward the educational then the aesthetic. The writer seems like a nice person and means well, but the article tends to take you part way down some roads and leaves you there without answers. Maybe he intends his readers to pursue those questions on their own, I don’t know. Still, being curious and not being a Buddhist I found it an easy introduction into some of Buddha’s history.

I’m a little tapped this week and won’t be able to chip in my share of the cost, but considering the mind numbing numbers involved I’m don’t think they’ll notice,The $2-Trillion War

Before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-director of the Office of Management and Budget Mitchell Daniels (now governor of Indiana) put the likely costs at between $50 billion and $60 billion. Former undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz (now president of the World Bank Group) claimed that increased Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the war. When President Bush’s economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey suggested that the actual costs might be closer to $100 billion or even $200 billion, the White House called those figures grossly exaggerated and swiftly fired him.

Those estimates now look Lilliputian. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) currently projects past and future Iraq-related expenditures to surpass $500 billion, and even that figure severely underestimates the full outlay, according to Bilmes and Stiglitz, whose paper indicates that the war will eventually cost Americans in excess of $2 trillion. (A trillion is a thousand billions.) Speaking of those in Congress who agreed early on to appropriate $87 billion to finance the war, Bilmes says, “Every time someone casts a vote, they implicitly make a cost-benefit analysis. Would they have voted the same way if they knew the costs were 10 times as much as advertised?”