Grass Growing

Boredom of the day

Perhaps one of the most boring activities imaginable and a great way to fall asleep and beat that insomnia. If only the camera didn't move so much.



January 9th, 2008 / 444 Comments / Tags: Daily Bore, Video

Discussion of Phylogenetic Relationships

This is an excerpt from "The Tree of Life Web Project". It is guaranteed to put the large majority of you to sleep. Goodnight in advance.

The kingdom Fungi is a diverse clade of heterotrophic organisms that shares some characters with animals such as chitinous structures, storage of glycogen, and mitochondrial codon UGA encoding tryptophan. Both animals and fungi have spores or gametes with a single smooth, posteriorly inserted flagellum, but only species of the basal chytrid phyla have retained this primitive character (Barr, 1992; Cavalier-Smith, 1987, 1995). Fungi, animals, and other heterotrophic protist-like organisms such as choanoflagellates and Mesomycetozoea are now considered part of the larger group termed opisthokonts (Cavalier-Smith, 1987) in reference to the posterior flagellum.

The branch uniting the fungi and animals is well-supported based on a number of molecular phylogenetic datasets, including the nuclear small subunit ribosomal RNA gene (Wainwright et al., 1993; Bruns et al. 1993), unique and shared sequence insertions in proteins such as elongation factor 1α (Baldauf and Palmer, 1993), entire mitochondrial genomes (Lang et al., 2002), and concatenated protein-coding genes (Steenkamp et al., 2006). Read More » January 13th, 2008 / 35696 Comments / Tags: Daily Bore, science, biology, words

MV Aurora (1977)

MV Aurora (1977) The M/V Aurora is a feeder vessel for the Alaska Marine Highway System. The M/V Aurora was built in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin in 1977 by Peterson Shipbuilders and commissioned by the Alaska Marine Highway System the same year. The Aurora is the younger sister ship to the M/V LeConte and both serve or have served as feeder vessels that pick up passengers in small communities such as Pelican and Hoonah and take them to larger regional communities (this process is colloquially known as the "milk run"). However, unlike the LeConte, the Aurora was moved out of Southeast Alaska into Prince William Sound area in 2005 to take the place of the retired M/V Bartlett. This move, however, was highly controversial as the M/V Chenega, a fast ferry, was supposed to take this role and been promised for years in advance to the Prince William Sound area and specifically to be homeported in the city of Cordova. Instead, the ferry system reneged on this promise and moved the Chenega to a Ketchikan-Wrangell route. Currently, the Aurora is being hubbed out of Cordova (although, unlike the fast ferry, the Aurora operates 24-hours a day so it doesn't have a crew that lives in its homeport thus denying that city the economic stimulus of additional residents/jobs. This is the primary motive for the especially rancorous uproar from Cordova regarding the Chenega's route placement) and operating principally between Cordova, Whittier, and Valdez with whistle stops (the ferry only stops if there are prior reservations) in Tatitlek and Chenega Bay.

Read More » December 20th, 2008 / 6167 Comments / Tags: Daily Bore, Navy, Maritime, Wikipedia