Strange and wonderful birds

I caught a bit of a nature show on birds: The Life of Birds, part N? with a David-Attenborough-like figure narrating. Some of the birds of New Zealand really caught my eye. Perhaps it’s just as well that the elephant bird or the terror bird are no longer around to dine on us; but it’s a shame that the giant coots, flightless parrots, kiwis, and other birds are so close to extinction.

And the hoatzin! I’d heard vaguely of a bird that had claws on its wings. But I never pictured the way the nestlings climb around on branches. They look very much like prehistoric birds just getting ready to use their feathers for the first time. Gliding from tree to tree has evolved much more often and in more animal taxa than pure flying.

The hoatzin is so adapted to eating masses of low-energy vegetation that it flies poorly. But its wings are well developed. The claws are a juvenile evolutionary trace.

There’s a wiki in my future

My latest contract assignment is as part of a team writing Help Desk training materials for dozens of legacy applications served over a wide-area network and used by different companies in the newspaper publishing business. After much debate, the project managers settled on a wiki–web-based, collaboratively written pages– for developing and delivering content. Everything from the first draft will be online, available for review. Later, it will be updated by the users themselves as they gain expertise. It’s going to be interesting!

Tangled Bank #108 at Wheat-dogg’s World

There’s a new collection of links to science articles at Wheat-dogg’s World: read Tangled Bank 108.

In Dembski: The failure that keeps on failing, our author glosses on Bill’s seeming immunity to rational, logical thought as Bill gripes about the lack of theology in Kenneth Miller’s biology textbooks.

Do your research!

Dot those I’s, cross those T’s.

more cat pictures