Dust Mites, Devolution, and Change…

Another scientific law bites the “dust,” sorry, the pun was too obvious to ignore. In the Journal Systematic Biology (March 8, 2013), the study, “Is Permanent Parasitism Reversible? — Critical Evidence from Early Evolution of House Dust Mites,” raises serious doubts against Dollo’s Law, essentially a treatise that states evolution is not reversible. Apparently, Dollo’s Law has been disproved.  The lowly dust mite is going backwards.

History, too, has been guilty of pushing a Dollo-esque trend, that human societies continue to evolve, not devolve.

 

Election Prediction: All Hail President…?

While I am waiting for radical Republican conservatism to fold up like a sneeze and expunge itself of so much Tea Party clap-trap (faux and non-faux), I fear the Obama pragmatism of the past four years may be its own undoing. There may be several valid reasons why Mitt Romney will be the next president of the United States and they need exploring:

 

Soylent Green is… Cow?

Ah, the great American hamburger. A few pickles, some cheese and onions hot off the grill: Oh, yeah – nothing better than really good cooked cow.

Well, how about sinking your teeth into a dripping, hot patty of laboratory grown beef?

That’s right, no cow necessary. Beef raised by Petrie-dish. Mm-mmm.

 

Sharing the Introduction, or, Why I’ve been in the research hole

I’ve been so busy hacking away at research and writing that I totally missed posting anything to this blog for the entire month of July! Gadzooks.

So I figure the best way to rectify this is to share a wee bit of what I’ve been working on. Below is the introduction to my paper “Robinson Crusoe: Cultural Reflections and the “Man in a State of Nature” Theme,” which will be presented at the International Sociesty for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture, next week at Pepperdine University. Only 904 words (a wee bit more than I thought)

 

“Soul by Soul”: That Has to Be My Goal

Chalk one up to the AHA (American Historical Association). To be honest, of late, I’ve been feeling a sense of being adrift. Not good: especially since I’m about to embark on a dissertation… in a foreign country. I need to be grounded, I need to feel a sense of the possible, not the improbable.

Then the latest AHA quarterly, American Historical Review (June 2012), arrived; an issue dedicated to all things “turning.” No, not my stomach (nerves); rather a huge issue dedicated to the historiography of recent “turns” within the discipline. The “cultural” turns grabbed my attention as microhistory – a cultural method – is the big sword I carry into Bristol University to get my work done.

 

“Urban Slang,” a “Vulgar Tongue,” and a “Woman in the Straw”

A few years back I marveled at the internet believing it the only place I could go to access an “urban slang” to English dictionary or translator (urbandictionary.com is one of my favorites). As an aged and balding white man, knowing and learning “the slang” meant a certain measure of “conversation” with my students. They seemed shocked that I knew some of their lingo, but soon figured out that I needed a computer to translate. Now they have apps that can translate that slang. Suddenly, I have an image of Mitt Romney in the streets of Boston poking at his 4G phone trying to figure out whether he’s been dissed or not.

 

How to find images via the Library of Congress web site

A tremendous amount of imagery is available to college students and scholars by of the Library of Congress. Problem is, the LOC’s web site is a bit clunky. So I produced this short video to show how one can navigate the catacombs of the LOC cyber space.