@terdon

@tchrist

happy birthday @tchrist :D

@RegDwigнt Thanks gorgeous hideous owl!

Thanks. I slept in today.

It's pea-soup outside right now. Eerie.

Thought for the Day: Why don't we call hackathons “coding bees”?

searches for goats

I sailed around that rock some decades ago, do goats swim?

oh sometimes animals conquer new islands on small rafts, it's not far away from mainland anyway

They do swim, but probably not so far.

Most mammals swim.

yea, can't think of a mammal that can't

Camel.

would they sink :)? or drown of exhaustion

Elephants don't swim, I think.

straightdope.com/mailbag/mcamelswim.html

they can youtube.com/watch?v=HpD40ewOyC4

So it says.

they have an integrated scuba

Great apes, including homies, have a bit of a rough time at it.

sci-news.com/biology/…

But it can happen.

Be warned that that link contains naked swimmers.

> Humans, who are closely related to the apes, also do not swim instinctively.

Hmmm.

Save this: What Really Happened to English? Examining the Celtic Hypothesis

I'm forever trying to dredge up the sorts of things it gathers together there.

@tchrist Is to-day your birth-day?

Happy it!

@Cerberus Thank you. I had crème brûlée avec fruits des bois for breakfast by way of celebratory indulgence.

Which sounds so much more refined than custard with berries.

But I did not make it myself, and so it bore no saffron.

Good.

I like crème brûlée, even if it be custard.

The crunchy top is nice.

A very fatty custard with a layer of hard caramel.

Quite.

Do you have a burner?

Custard is a comfort-food.

I do not.

If you do, crème brûlée is easy to make.

Oh.

They're always sold out because drug addicts use them for something I forget.

Oh, really?

Hmm.

Burning meth in pipes?

You can probably buy them online for a tenner.

I don't know.

I'm not a drug person, alas.

Sure, but then I'd never leave the house.

Plus it is a rather rich dessert.

Like booze, probably not something to get into the habit of consuming alone too often.

Mmm...

gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com/engl/Croc_sat.html

Nice page.

Lots of synonyms.

This is dimetrodon.

’Tis.

It lived during the early Permian.

I know.

Do you think it is closer to you, or to a dinosaur?

Not sure what you're measuring there.

DNA and genealogy.

Whose lesser cousin is it, yours or a dinosaur's?

Aka. phylogenetically closer.

It is in the mammaloids not the avioids.

Bravo.

Remember whom you're asking these simple questions of. :)

It is a indeed a synapsoid, a being "closer to mammals than to dinosaurs".

I knew its name when I was eight years old.

Well, I don't know anything about your biological knowledge. Besides, you might not have thought about it for a while.

So did I: I built it when I was eight years old.

They had a lot of mistaken ideas back then.

They taught us that it was a reptile.

I became a dinosaurophiliac a few years before the dinosaur rage began with Jurassic Park and such.

Lo these five and forty years ago.

Children often do.

And not purple ones.

In fact, a case can be made for calling it (and us) reptiles.

At any rate, we're all reptilomorpha.

You have to carve off clades.

Off from what?

Reptiles isn't a clade, is it, if you exclude dinosaurs and us?

The problem is that you have to remove mammals and dinobirds.

Exactly.

Or...perhaps you don't have to.

At any rate, I don't use the term in phylogenetics: too confusing.

Hm, axe-lizards.

πέλυξ σαῦρος

Why are birds and mammals connected?

And while I know where the dinosaurs sit there, I wonder if others do.

Hm, the first evidence for fur in mammalish things is from the mid-Jurassic, some 164 million years ago.

theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/03/…

Apparently we only find feathers on dinosaurs 150 million years ago.

So perhaps they were just trying to keep up with the Joneses.

@tchrist Perhaps because they are the main surviving endotherms?

@tchrist Just before the aves.

> The two naked men are a magnet for . . .

@tchrist I'm not sure whether that is evolutionarily possible...

Hmm naked men?

Yes, like attracts like. :)

> . . . visitors to London’s Natural History Museum.

cosmosmagazine.com/life-sciences/neanderthals-live-us

Somewhat odd.

@tchrist Does it? Wouldn't it make more sense to suspect a common cause behind both fur and feathers, rather than one being caused by the other?

@Cerberus This was a joke.

OK just checking.

The designers of those figures are Dutch.

Do they have any evidence that tattoos were popular in that age?

I wondered that.

I don't know.

I'm playing Schubert.

Because he will be played at the Concertgebouw tonight.

This evening.

Which?

concertgebouw.nl/concerten/…

> Anisodactyly, syndactyly, zygodactyly, heterodactyly, pamprodactyly, schizodactyly.

I like those.

Ah, the second movement is probably very well known.

That is, I know it.