© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Did dinosaurs sing like birds?

Did dinosaurs sing? Probably not, I guess. Maybe they just hissed and growled and roared as movie makers have mostly proposed. But then again, what if they whistled or made bird noises? As bird ancestors maybe that’s possible. At any rate I often wonder about the soundscape of the world during the long era of the biggish reptiles. It’s not really something you can get from fossils. And as soon as I finish wondering that, I start imagining future explorers wandering around a fossil planet Earth and trying to make sense of what they find. If…

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Life’s ironic behind the digital curtain

The Iron Curtain was not something you wanted to live behind, in my Cold War youth. All I knew about it came from media pundits and politicians, and they were pretty convinced that the folk who lived behind that impenetrable veil of metal were doing it tough. Primarily what they lacked was freedom, but also good movies, clothes and luxuries of various sorts. Powerful ruling elites in the countries behind the iron curtain looked after themselves, first and foremost, and the common herd ran a distant last in priorities. Vast resources were expended on weapons that…

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Potatoes, sex and heredity

Sir Francis Drake in 1580 (At least some people say so)Assured his name eternal fame by finding the potato.Old song I learnt at school Actually Drake didn’t find the potato at all. Peruvians had been cultivating potatoes in the Andes for thousands of years before Europeans turned up and took some home. And the Spanish certainly beat Drake to it, sometime in the late 1500s. Be that as it may, the humble spud certainly changed the world, as you can read in this book. And, while the potato changed the human world, humans also changed the…

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