Rose And Me

Camping tip

Palaeovespa florissantia This exceptionally preserved 34 million year old wasp was found and identified in what is today Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado. This species is a member of the same family of life that today also contains hornets and yellow jackets. The incredible preservation of this insect is one example of the fossils found in Eocene aged lake sediments in this part of Colorado (https://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js296djPx). The area was heavily picked over for fossils prior to establishment of the National Monument and there were even attempts to establish housing developments on the site before it received protection. Today this insect is pictured in the logo of this monument and shots of it can be found around the parking lots at the site. -JBB Image credit: NPS http://bit.ly/2nYZwga References: https://www.revolvy.com/page/Vespinae http://bit.ly/2N9jn7k

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Funny pets

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The concept of information as viewed in theoretical physics through statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, and its implications and connections with evolutionary biology. An interesting reading:

How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder (via WIRED -original story from Quanta Magazine)

Biological systems don’t defy physical laws, of course—but neither do they seem to be predicted by them. In contrast, they are goal-directed: survive and reproduce. We can say that they have a purpose—or what philosophers have traditionally called a teleology—that guides their behavior.

By the same token, physics now lets us predict, starting from the state of the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, what it looks like today. But no one imagines that the appearance of the first primitive cells on Earth led predictably to the human race. Laws do not, it seems, dictate the course of evolution.

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David Kaplan explains how the law of increasing entropy could drive random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life.

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Dog carved into a tree stump.

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