Extinction

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One of the classic scientific debates, on a par with “nature vs. nurture,” albeit far more obscure, is the question of what caused the great megafaunal extinction at the end of the Pleistocene.

Pretty much everywhere you look, you find evidence of big critters roaming the earth – mastodons, mammoths, big camels, and my favorite, beavers the size of black bears. And then they “blink out,” to borrow a lovely phrase I heard a biologist use recently. In a very short period of time in geologic terms, they’re gone.

Two dominant explanations are offered. The extinction coincides with the end of the Pleistocene, the emergence from the last ice age 10,000 years ago. That’s big-time climate change. Could that have killed them off? But there’s a second earth-changing event that happens around that same time – the explosion of us. Could we have killed them?

There’s a new review paper(sub. req.) in Friday’s Science by Barnosky et al. that offers a classically equivocal answer – it’s both! And more research is needed!
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Laramie, Albuquerque

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I went to the opening last night of the Albuquerque High theater kids’ performance of The Laramie Project.

It was draining and moving and I’m tremendously proud of what the kids accomplished. It’s a play worth caring about, and they honored it.

Tonight (Fri.) and Saturday this weekend (Oct. 1 and 2) and next Thurs. – Sat. (Oct. 7 – 10), 7 p.m., at the Albuquerque High School theater, 800 Odelia Rd NE. (Odelia is Indian School west of Interstate 25, enter the theater on the school’s east side entrance.)

Doing Docs

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In the course of building GNOME 2.8, I happened to see some DocBook errors flying past in the terminal window, and I thought, “Well, there’s something I know how to fix.” So today I sat down and banged out a patch to the Rhythmbox docs so they’re now valid DocBook. I was pretty rusty – the details of DocBook are thankfully not something that I’d committed to memory – there’s only so much room in my brain.

Inspired and with nothing else pressing to do this afternoon (I’d already cleaned the stove), I found a couple of other places where docs fixes were in order in 2.8. The dictionary docs got a necessary tweak, and shaunm pointed me to a new contribution from the Sun team – docs for the vino thingie – that had yet to be integrated. Integrated they now are, at least in CVS.

The Laramie Project

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For those of you reading this in Albuquerque, the Albuquerque High School theater kids are doing The Laramie Project over the next two weekends. It is the story of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of what happened to Matthew Shepard. My daughter, Nora, is in it, and I’m really proud of her and her theater colleagues for doing something important. You should go see it if you happen to live here.

Thurs. – Sat., this weekend (Sept. 30 – Oct. 2) and next (Oct. 7 – 10), 7 p.m., at the Albuquerque High School theater, 800 Odelia Rd NE. (Odelia is Indian School west of Interstate 25, enter the theater on the school’s east side entrance.)

Vuelta

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Fernando:

No, the U.S. television network that carries cycling spent all its money on the Giro and Le Tour, and decided not to air the Vuelta. Sucks, as it looks like this was a far better race than Le Tour this year, in terms of suspense and fan excitement offered. I’ve been reduced to reading the daily Velonews coverage.

A.E. Douglass and the Sunspot Cycle

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I’ve written before about my interest in A.E. Douglass, a turn-of-the-last-century astronomer and all-around scientist (the disciplines were so less clearly defined a hundred years ago) who almost accidentally developed dendrochronology.

In the process, Douglass revolutionized two sciences – archaeology and paleoclimate studies – but he was after something entirely different. He was studying the sun, and wanted to know whether the 11-year sunspot cycle was a permanent feature. He figured that trees, by putting on fat rings in wet years and thin ones in dry years, might show signs of a periodicity linked to the solar cycle. The archaeology was nowhere near his mind when he got started, and the climate stuff was only a means to his astronomical end.
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