Daily Dose

I shot this girl out of my car window last week on a bridge up in Oakland. Loved the shadows on her legs.

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Leslie is taking care of some of her late Aunt's affairs in Florida so me and the cat are batching it.

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I have a new blog for my business. I have been remiss in creating a new website so this will have to do for now.

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Hudgins sent this cool Vimeo link over. Sophie Clive's Murmeration. Stunningly beautiful.

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Shawn sent footage of the man riding the giant wave in Portugal.

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Robin Adler and her band Mutts of the Planet tore up Dizzy's. I can't wait to see the video they are producing of the concert, the playing of Joni Mitchell's Blue and Court and Spark in their entirety by a crack group of musicians. Read the incredible review in the Reader here.

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Pandora users might want to check out one of my stations, Rob's Psychedelic Buffet.

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Renée sends over this opinion by Annie Leonard, We're not broke.

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I look at the current state of Republican candidates and I have to cringe. Seriously, is this the best you can do? Is your party so bereft of sanity that you are reduced to this circus cast of characters? With the exception of the two reasonable candidates, who possessed of sanity can never get out of the shadows of the buffoons, Huntsman and Johnson, this is like something out of Cuckoos Nest. Romney will be the de facto candidate. A rich, uninspiring pablum of a candidate, the country can certainly do worse. Definitely dropped in my eyes last week when he absolutely signed on to the "Personhood Amendment" which thankfully went up in flames in Mississippi. Good on you Mississippi. Everyone, myself included, were sure that you were going to cast a vote back to the dark ages. Shows that we should not judge. Lot of top democrats were on board as well.

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Check out Brian Beutler's article in TPM on the Republican's plan to right the economy. Here is a neat couple of graphs. If you do not like to read graphs I will explain. Raise the taxes of everyone but the rich.

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The new red list is out on lost species and things aren't going so well. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has a detailed listing of over 61,900 plant and animal species. We just lost the Western Black Rhino in Africa. Forever. Twenty five percent of the mammals on the list are threatened. The IUCN also listed five out of eight tuna species as "threatened" or "near threatened," and added 26 recently discovered amphibians to the Red List, including the blessed poison frog. Check out the list, you can toggle between threatened and extinct.

Of course as Rush Limbaugh has intimated on occasion, not all species will live forever. If you can't hack it in this mean old world, you might as well just pull over.

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Read an interesting report yesterday that says that we are losing a language every two weeks on this planet.

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Looks like the Obama Administration is postponing the permitting of the Keystone Pipeline until after the election. You know, the pipeline that will allow Canadians to get rich shipping oil to China through our ports and threatens to despoil the high plains Ogallala aquifer. He can disappoint the environmentalists later, he can use their votes right now.

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You know that I am a genetics nut. Interesting posts from the recent conference in Texas at this woman Cece Moore's blogpost.  I learn that:

• Humans and chimps are 98.8% identical in their DNA

• Our species had at least 15 cousins. Only we remain.

• The immunity gene STAT2 is the first clear example of interbreeding advantage. It introgressed from Neandertal and is positively selected in Melanesians.

• Neandertal + Denisovan = ~8% of modern Melanesian genome. Chr 12 introgressed in Melanesians with a Denisova-like region.

• Neandertal sequence shares more variants with present day non-Africans than Africans. (Green 2010) 

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Old friend Ricardo sends this remarkable footage of an eagle owl over from his home in Thailand. I am lucky to have so many friendships reaching into their fourth decade!

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That is all.