Happy Bastille Day!

In keeping with my theme of British actors doing fake, funny, French accents ...

The French are the worst tourists

According to a new study commissioned by Expedia.com has found the French to be the worst tourists in the world.

French holidaymakers and business travellers were the least generous or ready to tip, and ranked next-to-last for their overall behaviour and politeness.

Pushy French travellers made amends on elegance -- classed third -- as well as for their discretion and cleanliness.

But the French were the least ready to try a new language, unlike US tourists who were most likely to swallow their pride and order a pizza, baguette or a paella in the local lingo.

This of course comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with French castles on the English countryside.

Iranian uprising

The situation in Iran is getting tenser and tenser. I don't see the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad marionette act surviving much longer. If there was any doubt left that the election was rigged, it was removed yesterday when Iran admitted that in at least 50 cities there were more votes than voters. Of course they're trying to spin it, but as Nate Silver points out, the only explanations that add up are those of fraud.

This leaves only two possibilities: that there was widespread ballot-stuffing or that the results in some or all areas don't reflect any physical count of the ballots but were fabricated whole hog on a spreadsheet.

Between the obviously rigged election and the creation of a martyr for the opposition, the Iranian people have had enough. Mousavi is encouraging his suporters to stand up to the regime, and they are. The Basij militia are acting like thugs and vandals--breaking windows, destroying property, and beating helpless grandmothers (acording to some reports). All this is only inflaming the ire of a people who are increasingly seeing the current Iranian leadership as illegitimate. It's only a matter of time before key elements in the government and/or petroleum industry side with the protesters and refuse to continue supporting the cabal. That will be the death knell of the dictatorship.

There are scores of videos pouring out of Iran as I write this. I've watched many of them, but the one I have embedded below in some senses is the most amazing. I couldn't help but cheer (out loud) on the protesters as I watched it. Can you watch this and not cheer them on too?

Battle w/ Police - Tehran, Iran - June 20th 2009
by mightier-than

note: A great site for updates is Andrew Sullivan.

My Cyborg Name

Get Your Cyborg Name

(via Mors dei)

Edward Current chimes in on Ida

Mary Roach at TEDTalks

Mary Roach tells the crowd 10 things they didn't know about orgasm in this TEDTalks video.



(via)

Meet Ida!

Meet Ida! a.k.a. Darwinius masillae. Ida is a 47 million year old fossil primate that was discovered in the Eocene fossil beds in Messel Germany. Ida was 24 cm. (~10 in.) from head to tail, meaning that--by some estimates--she probably weighed a little over a pound. In the picture below you can see the whole skeleton. It is fairly rare to find complete Eocene mammal skeletons--particularly primates. You can read online research paper about Ida here.

And Ida is just wonderful! On the downside, her skull was crushed, but on the upside, you can actually see where her fur was! (click on picture to embiggenize) Kewl!!!



You might have noticed that Ida kind of looks like a lemur. But there are morphological traits there that put her into the Cercamoniinae, from which modern anthropoids (monkeys and apes) evolved. In other words, we have ourselves a complete transitional primate fossil. This is super exciting!

Another thing we know abot Ida is that she was a juvenile. How do we know that, you ask? Check out her teeth!



You can clearly see that she has a mix of fully developed and developing teeth. For example, the M1 molars above are developed and in place but the M2 molars are still moving and the M3 molars probably haven't broken through the gums yet. We can compare this pattern to the dental development of similarly sized modern primates to estimate that Ida was about 80% of the way to full maturity when she died. And as I said before, there's much more in the paper.

Yay for science!

Franzen, J., Gingerich, P., Habersetzer, J., Hurum, J., von Koenigswald, W., & Smith, B. (2009). Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology PLoS ONE, 4 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005723