Archive for the ‘Wild Life’ Category

Pandas Are Nature’s Bloggers

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Ace of Spades:

Let’s see, pandas live alone, are sexually inept and watch porn.

It seems that Chinese zoos have found that panda porn and live sex shows help naive pandas learn to mate.

Oh, and beer goggles even work for fruit flies:

15 Biologists at the University of California at San Francisco have found that male fruit flies exposed to high levels of alcohol become hypersexual and try to court practically anything with wings, including other male fruit flies. Eventually the revelry turns into a dysfunctional orgy, with “a chain of males chasing each other,” says one insect expert (subscription).

Via Cold Fury.

Speaking of Frigid…

Friday, February 1st, 2008

John Tierney points to an interesting minority report put out by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which attempts to debunk fears that man-made global climate change is driving polar bears to extinction.

It’s notable for the link to this study critiquing the forecasting methods used by researchers predicting the polar bear demise. The forecasting critique comes from the Forecasting Principles website. I didn’t know that anyone had studied forecasting itself as a discipline. This chapter from the website authors’ book on forecasting looks like a useful introduction.


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