Yellow Fibre Bundle

palm flowers from gardenThese are quite lovely, aren’t they? I always have great difficulty getting these giant structures (whole thing is about a metre long) down from the tall palm trees that produce them. I take them down because they produce a huge mess over the rest of the garden as they develop. Not the lovely tiny yellow flowers but the little palm nuts (tiny scale model (large grape-sized) coconuts, essentially – same family) that result later, one nut for each of those tiny yellow buds that you see!

So I cut them off. Sad, I know, but there it is.

I do it early because they have to fall. Where do they fall? All over the plants below, doing a lot of damage if I am unlucky. Better to have the much lighter blooms fall (still bad enough) than the […] Click to continue reading this post

Joshua Redman on NPR

joshua redman by michael wilsonThere was a nice piece on NPR (by John Ydstie) featuring Joshua Redman today (photo left by Michael Wilson). He’s one of my favourite of the young (relatively) saxophonists on the Jazz scene today. (Some Wiki info here.) When I was an East coaster I saw him a number of times in concert, and he was always very good indeed. His albums are very good too – fun and full of personality, very soulful, although not hugely ground-breaking (not that this is always necessary to make a great musician). By the way, Joshua Redman’s music is actually a good starter place for people who might want to start out in Jazz by listening to some […] Click to continue reading this post

Parthenogenesis, II

bonnethead sharkRemember Flora? The Komodo dragon? I blogged about her here and here. She produced offspring using parthenogenesis while in captivity last year. Well, there was a news story earlier this week about a bonnethead shark in in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska giving birth to a pup. (Interestingly, zoo-keepers and news reporters seemed uninterested in giving our subject shark a name, as happened for the reptile.)

It was a puzzle for a while as to how she did it (as I learned in a BBC article):

At the time, some theorised that a male tiger shark kept at the zoo could have been the father – but the institution’s three bonnethead females had none of the bite marks that are usually inflicted on their gender during shark sex.

Some even suggested that one of the females could have had sex in the wild and stored the sperm in her body – but the three-year period in captivity made this explanation highly unlikely.

But eventually DNA tests resolved the issue:
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The Burning, II

Well, I’d expected that I’d have got to go to Griffith Park to do a hike and maybe show you some pictures to give you an idea of the changes since the fire (fire posts here and here). This has not happened yet, partly because last I heard they were not allowing people close to those areas… that may have changed by now. It has been over ten days since I checked.

Anyway, Colin Brown of Silver Lake was up there quite soon afterwards, and took many photos. They are not really for the squeamish, since he focused a lot on the animal remains that he found. So don’t look if you are likely to be disturbed by the […] Click to continue reading this post