Monday, August 2, 2010

Cephalopod Links Number 4.5

At National Geographic, you can check out some footage and a story about the successful attachment of a critter cam to a Humboldt squid.  I'll have to get ahold of their television show somehow, seeing as I don't have TV, and it was last Friday, anyways.

Although it's an old piece, I want to point out this article on the expansion of the Humboldt squid's range.  It's a very interesting topic, and one that is still (as far as I know) ripe for investigation and theorizing.

PZ Meyers points out a video claiming (among other things fallacies) that the fossil record of coleoid cephalopod ancestors provides evidence against "macroevolution".  Of course, the alternative, and so presumably correct, theory is "Intelligent Design".  Wow.

Folks in Delaware can head down to the Delaware Seashore State Park and dissect a squid for $8, among other great activities.  Now that's good use of public facilities!

Departing from cephalopod-related links for a moment, Virginia Heffernan has written this piece over at the New York Times that's gotten science bloggers in a tizzy, and which I can't help but feel a wee bit offended by.  While most of the article is spent blasting ScienceBlogs in particular (which I find catty and off-topic much of the time, too,) she has a few cracks at science blogging in general, including this gem:

          "...science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant
          and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith
          moral authority from the word “science” and from
          occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and
          thats."

Please, stop me the next time I start throwing around "incendiary rhetoric"on Cephalove.

Check out this cool video of giant octopus kites.

And then this one of S. latimanus in an agonistic encounter, complete with some great changes in coloration.

Circus of the Spineless #53, that virtual periodical on all things invertebrate, is up at The Birder's Lounge.  Make sure to check it out for an interesting assortment of writing on all sorts of spineless wonders.

I'll be back later in the week with some more cephalopod photographers, and a few science-y posts.  I'm thinking about tackling the "cephalopod consciousness" issue, although it will take a bit of work to get ahold of the literature, read it, and then work out where I stand.  Nonetheless, I'll see what I can get up here.

Thanks for reading!

2 comments:

  1. Hey Mike,

    thanks for stopping by my blog. So glad you did, as it led me to yours and now, you're officially blogrolled.

    Watch out for "incendiary rhetoric". Ha!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I appreciate your efforts of striving to provide us with the useful science information. It would be great if you some up with a kind of publication and I wish you best of luck with it.

    ReplyDelete