This is really cool:

How much life could you find in one cubic foot? That’s a hunk of ecosystem small enough to fit in your lap. To answer the question, photographer David Liittschwager took a green metal frame, a 12-inch cube, to disparate environments—land and water, tropical and temperate. At each locale he set down the cube and started watching, counting, and photographing with the help of his assistant and many biologists.

From: One Cubic Foot — Photo Gallery — National Geographic Magazine.

Have you ever told someone you would call at ten o’clock, only to realize they thought you meant ten o’clock their time instead of your time? I mean, it’s all good, except you called them at two o’clock in the morning. No big deal.

I have for some time now maintained that we should abolish time zones. When I suggest this I invariably get a response as such: “That’d just be silly, James.”

But stop for a moment and consider if the entire world was all a single time zone. I assert that it would be a simpler place.

What Time Shall I Call At?

Consider the benefits of a single time zone:

• There would never be any mix up about when to call people. If you said that you would call at six o’clock, it would always mean six o’clock.
• You wouldn’t need to change your watch time when you traveled.
• Computers wouldn’t have to set the time zone upon first turning on. Also, computers wouldn’t continually be getting into the wrong time zone with daylight savings changes, and posted times on the Internet would always coincide.
• Speaking of daylight savings time, don’t even get me started on it. This would deal with that problem once and for all.
• The entire world would celebrate the New Year at the exact same time. No more Aussies feeling smug because they get to be in the next year before us.
• International business would have less trouble staying coordinated. Computers, of course, don’t have any problems staying coordinated. You know why? Because they all run on the same time zone—UTC. But this would be good for the businessmen.

Duel at High Noon

The first question many people ask is what would happen to noon and midnight. Nothing, really. They would fall into the category of dawn and dusk. When you consider “dawn” you don’t think about a specific time, say six o’clock in the morning. Instead, you think about the point in time when the sun is rising. Same with dusk. Midnight would cease to be twelve o’clock at night and would become “the middle point of the night.” Noon would become “half way through the day” or when the sun is directly overhead.

In individual cities, a particular time might become connected with noon or midnight. If, for example, the sun was always directly overhead at five o’clock p.m.¹ then “noon” would now be synonymous with “five” in that city.

Some might say that this adds a layer of confusion, rather than removing one. But if you currently say “I’ll call you at noon” it isn’t any better. All you’re really saying is “I’ll call you at twelve.” It doesn’t actually clear up any time zone problems. Twelve might still be two, their time.

The worst that could happen is that two people in the same city—perhaps one is from out of town—agree to meet at noon but have different conceptions of when noon is. I believe, however, that a commonly defined value would quickly emerge or people would soon learn to use precise numbers for scheduling.

What Would We Lose?

In addition to the possible confusion over meeting at noon or midnight mentioned above:

• The cultural attachment we have to the o’clock hours. The sun rises at six, coffee break is at ten, and work ends at five. Such a drastic switch would mean giving up these familiarities. Work would end at five, seven, eleven, or two, depending on where you were. The worst part of this might actually concern literature and the arts. Common phrases like “it’s five o’clock somewhere” would eventually cease to have anything but historical meaning.
• Conversion difficulties. Just like switching to the metric system (something I wholeheartedly support), there would be a cost involved to switch. Employee manuals, street signs, and many other things would need to be changed.
• In addition to the conversion difficulties, a few printed materials would need to become localized. Imagine a restaurant change that has “Breakfast at Eight” signs. These would now only be applicable for a specific location; other locations would need different signs.
• Moving permanently between locations would require greater adjustment. The work hour shift might be “nine to five” one location, but “twelve to eight” another. This would require acclimatization. (Short travel, on the other hand, would become easier, as calculating times would not be an issue.)

Going the Way of the Imperial System

Time zones came into regular use with the advent of the train systems of the nineteenth century. At the time they made sense, as there was no easy means of keeping universal time. That is no longer the case, however, and time zones may now cause as much trouble as they solve.

Sadly, I doubt my idea will ever be implemented. In fact, that may actually be a good thing; it’s entirely possible that the benefits of switching would not make up for the costs. I don’t pretend to be able to clearly calculate either. But it is, at least, an interesting thought experiment.

I just finished reading Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin and he spends a lot of time offering examples of how shared structure in animals can tell us about their ancestors. There’s a prime example of this in the news today: alligators and birds share a common lung structure. Specifically, alligators breathe in only one direction, like birds, instead of in two, like mammals. Why is this important?

The researchers believe the similarity in lung structure may explain why some animals were better able to adapt after the extinction, when oxygen levels dropped.

“We know that birds are really good at breathing in hypoxic conditions. They can fly at altitudes that would kill a mammal,” said Dr Farmer.

“Many archosaurs, such as pterosaurs, apparently were capable of sustaining vigorous exercise. Lung design may have played a key role in this capacity.

“That’s been a puzzle, why do birds have these very different lungs? But now we can date it back to the common ancestor of birds and crocodilians.

From the BBC article. (See also NewScientist.)

There are too many good insights in this article to quote them all:

Whatever else Texas may have going for it, teaching religion in science class is inexcusable, whether or not it’s dressed in the deceptive language of intelligent design.  My (very) conservative Catholic grandma believes that evolution and faith are compatible.  Plenty of people do.  That’s because they are compatible.  The evolution vs. creation debate is less about that issue than it is about cultural dominance in general. It’s just one battleground chosen in the ongoing culture wars.

Needless to say, you should just go read it:

When the overwhelming scientific consensus points to evolutionary biology as the explanation for life, Christians have two choices.  They can say that this is consistent with their religion (God created everything including the field of evolutionary biology); or they can attempt to subvert the overwhelming consensus to fit their own narrative. Conservative institutions like, say, the Catholic Church have chosen the former over the latter.

From “Roger Ebert, Ben Stein, and the culture wars”.

I never returned to my stated confusion regarding the new tetrapod fossil footprints. The original BBC article was particularly unclear regarding the dates. The following is from one of many articles which explain this:

Tiktaalik lived around 375 million years ago, although even older elpistostegids, dating back to 385 million years, have been found.

But trackways found at a disused quarry at Zachelmie in the Holy Cross Mountains of southeastern Poland have thrown the timeline and the elpistostegids’ role into question.

In a paper released by the British weekly journal Nature, a team led by tetrapod sleuth Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, Sweden, report the finding of a dozen distinctive “hand” and “foot” prints from a creature that lived around 395 million years ago.

via Fish out of water: When did animals move to land?

I’ve returned from holiday travels—and the subsequent craziness at work—and have just about caught up with life. To make up for my absence, enjoy this article from the Daily Mail Online.

© Reptile and Amphibian Ecology International and/or Paul S. Hamilto

A gecko so small it can perch on top of a pencil has been discovered along with dozens of new animal species in Ecuador’s threatened rainforest.

BBC News reports on “footprints of the first fish to walk on land“:

Researchers in the science journal Nature say the discovery of the footprints of a crocodile-like creature has led them to rethink our understanding of the evolution of life.

They don’t really say why exactly this is making them rethink things (no dates, etc.) I would be skeptical if the first fish on land had feet rather than fins, but maybe that’s the point.

NCTimes covers a new paper by Richard Lenski on the “Evolution Of A Beneficial Mutation”:

In other words, the other 11 populations may have evolved through different beneficial mutations to the same outcome, in terms of increased survival. If that is true, then there would be no evolutionary pressure in the 11 populations to evolve a mutation that would be superfluous or perhaps even harmful.

From the paper itself:

The latter explanation adds historical contingency, such that the likelihood of a particular outcome is conditional on whether some other event has already occurred.

This is essentially what Neil Shubin says in Your Inner Fish concerning the evolution of bodies: that organisms had the DNA to evolve them but weren’t able to until the advent of significant amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere.

When I get a chance to read the paper itself, I’ll try to post my impressions.

From the New York Times:

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

[...]

“Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”

A small step forward, but a huge advance against the death penalty.

I’ve often wondered if our modern obsession with anti-bacterial stuff was causing as many problems as it solved. AP takes a look at that exact problem in “Solution to killer superbug found in Norway“:

The World Health Organization says antibiotic resistance is one of the leading public health threats on the planet. A six-month investigation by The Associated Press found overuse and misuse of medicines has led to mutations in once curable diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, making them harder and in some cases impossible to treat.

Now, in Norway’s simple solution, there’s a glimmer of hope.