flightosome

Many years ago, a colleague in Biology introduced me to the paper "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis".  It is a funny and educational look at the different approaches to understanding in biological sciences and electronic engineering, including such gems as:

How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Figure 2). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

And so on. 

So when I came agross the blog post "The Flightosome" with the wonderful sketch showing a biologist's model of air travel:

(I particularly like the inhibitory links)

I had to send him the link immediately.  His response: "it’s hilarious (and tragic)"

It's just that biology is so complex, and complicated, and messy, and variable.  And endlessly fascinating.

black-holed spam

We get spam articles submitted to the journal: obviously out of scope, and with many LMM "tells".  I have noticed an increase in prestigious-sounding second authors, but whose emails bounce.  I have always assumed the first author is trying to look more legitimate without letting the alleged second author be aware of the submission.  We don't usually worry about this, since we are desk-rejecting these papers anyway.

However, lately, there has been a rash of submissions where the submitting author's email bounces.  This effectively black-holes their submission, as there is no way for us to let them know they have been desk-rejected.  But I am unable to determine a use case for this activity: cui bono?

melting our robot overlords

I got sent this link today.  A robot manufacturer needed to decomission a batch of previous-model robots.  Dismantling them would be too time-consuming; binning them would risk exposing trade secrets.  So they asked the internet what to do. And they got an answer.

So they did.  In a most spectacular manner.  Read the post; it's more than worth it.  

there's something almost joyful about their leaps

Then watch the video.

O brave new world, That has such robots in't!

red and swirly

 Amazingly red sunset (it was actually redder!) underneath delicately swirly clouds (click to embiggen).

18:00 BST, looking west

even smaller potatoes

The final potato crop of the year, with many marble-sized items.

these have been washed, because there has actually been some rain recently!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLX

The latest batch:

small potatoes

Our latest crop of potatoes.  They are rather smaller than usual this year, probably due to the long summer drought.

for scale, the tiles are 15cm (~6") on a side