Wow

Do you have a party line?

Cal's recruits

Nice to see some size in there. I heard that guard from Montana is a hothead and totally uncoachable though.

I can't quit sports

despite the more-often-than-not disappointments. It's just too awesome to be able to tune in for an hour or four and see the results of years of training and strategizing come down to one play, one shot, one at-bat, or one 10 second race.

The only thing comparable, for me, is watching (good) movies: millions spent to make them, and I get to enjoy for $8. Or free if my wife's coworkers have been home to the Philippines recently and picked up some bootleg copies.

Sports rule. Losing sucks, but sports still rules.

This looks fun

This sounds cool

Apparently, geologic time isn't always so slow. The article's tone is a bit overheated, I mean volcanoes and earthquakes happen all the time, but a new ocean? The earth opening like a zipper? Cool.

RTA!!

join the Tourney Pick 'Em!!

c'mon! you're running out of time and we will be bereft of your witty banter on the MB (even Torture Chamber, though he probably won't admit it)

pleease!

Schedule for the first round of the NCAA tourney (with times)

will there be a quiz?

because I am so over taking quizzes.

I think I'll be busy then

but I can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing.

definitely no mixed loyalties

It will completely rock if Cal beats Texas (even if it busts my bracket). otherwise, I will be cheering for Texas (unless they come up against P-10 in the semis or something).

the Bozeman article was interesting, despite being moderately-aged. I'd forgotten about him and his "parting gift" to Cal (NCAA sanctions). I didn't know about that NCAA coaches purgatory either, so I learned something. thank you, Parham.

Cal

a 7 seed. okay. but I doubt they'll get past Texas in the 2nd round, alas.

interesting article

though you should probably note that it is ~ year and a half old. Is Bozeman working anywhere now?

I still think Arenas has "heart."

Which gives you the ability to play well despite adversity, lack of recognition, or whatever outside problems.

Clearly though, that is a quality independent of "class." Didja hear the guy labeled himself the "assassin of the Eastern Conference." That is both bold and kind of assholish.

Nice picture... got both guns-a-blazin'.

awww...

you're killin' me jumbos.

do we have to get into whether "My primary scientific interests are in population genetics and phylogenetics." is a sufficiently narrow description of research or not?

also, nice pussy.

Come on people

Let's start putting links into our posts with some consideration for our fellow EFFLers pending carpal tunnel syndrome: i.e. the less the copy and paste I have to do, the better. I know hellbenders can figure it out.

excellent sports blog, IMHO

though I admit I don't read many blogs, sports or otherwise. these guys are pretty funny.

http://www.deadspin.com/

Sorry, here's the stories

Daily Mail
Fox News
BBC

The BBC story, which I hadn't read before, is much better... They actually have other siblings, and they have an actual brain abnormality.

Hey Zero

You gotta link the original story on sh*t like that. It's just polite.
You're right though, the evolutionary bla bla bla is pretty bad, if you quoted it correctly, which I don't know 'cause you didn't link it.

Also, chimps and gorillas knuckle-walk, they don't run on the flats of their hands like those retards are. Maybe palm-walking should be the diagnostic character for the species I am describing for PNAS, Homo quadrapedalus.

Scientific Crap, I think

The scientists are saying shit like, "And it could provide invaluable information on how humans evolved from a four-legged hominid into a creature walking on two feet." And "Some researchers argue the genetic fault has caused the brothers and sisters to regress to a form of 'backward evolution'." And "Prof Humphrey said he thought the family had reverted to an instinctive form of behaviour encoded deep in the brain but abandoned during evolution."













Uhhh... They also say, "The five are all mentally retarded. Their mother and father are closely related."

So... I'm just gonna throw this out there, but isn't it more likely that the first mentally retarded kid just never started walking upright, maybe related to his parents thinking he was just retarded and they didn't know what to do with him--that it was normal for him to not develp into a regular kid--and also related to the fact that they live isolated from any other people, so the kid never thought about trying to be like other kids his age and walk upright. And then, the siblings just took after their older brother. Simple as that. That is more parsimonious than invoking some incredible reverse evolution to deep encoded hominid developmental pathways.

It's like if the movie Deliverance were a documentary, then the scientists would infer that homosexual rape and retarded banjo playing was an ancestral hominid condition.

Deflation only happens

if you are burning (or cutting) the extra calories when you stop cycling your bonus-androgens. Barry can't really run, his knee is still a mess. Have you seen his waist lately? Not nearly as trim as it was even a year or two ago. Barry is also 10 years older than Giambi was when he ramped down his juice-age, so it's gonna be harder for him to lose weight just from a metabolism standpoint.

Barr-oid Bonds

After all the press he and Balco and friends have gotten, I guess I don't find the story as shocking as the media is playing it. It's more like, "oh. okay. so he was on steroids."

Has anyone read the story yet? I started it on the site, but I'll wait for my SI to arrive (I got a free trial that I was about to cancel).

So here's my question. How is it that Barry is still completely large? I always assumed that he wasn't on 'roids since he didn't deflate like some other players (Jason Giambi being particularly noteworthy). Could he still be on stuff? and thinking it's undetectable? WTF?

Baaaaaarrrry!

picture for TREE

Too bad we can't submit group photos. This one has herpetological, evolutionary, and EFFL significance. Plus, if you look closely you can see the charred corpse of rat (or maybe squirrel) that caused a blackout on UC campus several years ago.

Come on!

Let's get somebody we know on the cover!!! Everybody send this on to friends, and send in a pic of yourself. Come on, it'll be funny.

Subject heading: Faces of the future.

We are editing two special issues of Trends in Ecology and Evolution to mark
TREE's 20th birthday. These issues take a hard look at the future of our
subject, and to celebrate this, we would like to construct one of the covers
as a collage of the people who are the future: the graduate students and
young post-docs of today. A poster size rendition of the cover is also
likely to be produced.

If you would like to appear in this visualisation of the next twenty years,
please send a picture of yourself to tree@elsevier.com by the end of March,
along with the statement of permission below. The pictures will be used
without attribution. The pictures will be small on the cover, so we need
faces only, and filling the image like a passport picture. The pictures
must be no bigger than 100kb and saved as a .jpeg or .tif file. We will use
them in order of arrival if we get too many, and if we get too few, we will
assume the worst for the future of our subject.

Statement of permission: "I (your name) grant permission to reproduce this
photograph worldwide as part of the cover image of TREE and in all revisions
and translations of the cover image in print and in all the forms of media,
now or hereafter known (including books, journals, CD-ROMs, online and
internet), derivative works based on this journal, and other publications or
advertising material published by Elsevier."

Best wishes, Andrew Read (Edinburgh) & Jim Clark (Duke), Birthday editors, &
Katrina Lythgoe, TREE Editor.

Many thanks and best wishes,

Katrina

tree@elsevier.com

cal v. usc

was anyone at the game? I just read this story about a prank pulled on one of the USC players. very funny.

http://rangelife.typepad.com/rangelife/2006/03/victoria_not_vi.html

I'm sending in these pics to TREE

Check this request out.

Would you bother publishing in

A brand new journal with no history whatsoever, no impact ratings, not found on any reference databases (yet) just a stated purpose that lines up very well with your work, and an editorial board full of people whom you'd like to have read your paper?

Or would it be better to go for a more-or-less appropriate, established journal with a low-to-fair impact factor?

This is all hypothetical, of course.

Disappointing

I felt, about 1/2 way through the conference season, like Cal had overcome a lot of their problems of previous years. These would be, being impotent against certain teams like AZ, Stanford, (but then Cal beat every Pac team at least once this year) dropping dumb games after big wins, bad road records, the injury bug, and bad late-game foul shooting.

Then they go and bring back the late-season fade. So very, very disappointing. I kind of want to blame the coach, but I don't have much evidence to support this. A couple wins in the Pac tourney will help.

new shark species

In the Sea of Cortez

Some of EFFL better read this paper

Check this out.