Category: Housekeeping

Stuff about the blog itself.

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Pardon our appearance

Oh no! Something has gone horribly wrong. Content has vanished without trace from our new improved look. I’m working on it. Or rather, I will be later in the day. Sorry.

Later, that same night … 

OK, we’re more or less back in business here. Still some tweaking and such to do — header pictures, for one thing — but basically fine. And it has prompted us to take a step towards something we’ve been discussing for a while: a three column layout. Or maybe everyone hates that idea? ((Testing the footnotes))

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A little clean-up

Sunday morning; what could be nicer than to do a little weeding, planting and general tidying up? Nothing, if you have a row to hoe. Alas, if you don’t, there’s always blog maintenance.

I’ve updated various things so they ought to run more smoothly, fixed a page for The Competition, and done various other things that ought to be invisible.

One thing that is visible is a new category we call Nibbles.  It’ll appear over on the right, and is designed for linking to things that don’t really require much comment, but that we think may be of interest. We’ll see how it works out. If you have any comments, add them to this post. Thanks.

Oh, one more thing. The RSS feeds do not seem to be working all that well. Not sure why. The various different feeds (Posts, Comments, Nibbles) all seem to point to exactly the same place, which can’t be right. I’m working on it.

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Tangled Bank

Tangled Bank No. 77 is up at Aetiology, with its usual selection of blog-posts on biology in general. That includes Andy Jarvis’ piece on climate change here, and also news that chimpanzees may have been using tools — stones to crack nuts — for more than 4000 years. That doesn’t quite make them proto-hunter gatherers, but it is somewhat mind-blowing that the scientists were able to identify a bunch of stones as tools.

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Transitions

Well, my three months’ break in Kenya is coming to an end, unfortunately. I’ll be starting a new job in a couple of days, and, what with the moving and getting settled in and stuff, blogging will probably be a bit slow over the next week or so. But Jeremy will take up the slack, wont you Jeremy?

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The First Great Agro.agro.biodiver.se Competition

I was pretty blown away by a student video on biodiversity that I first saw at Evolving Thoughts, a science blog. It is a really classy little film, one I would have been proud to have made myself, a rapid romp through the entire subject of biodiversity and why it matters. But — you knew there was going to be a but — the entire thing devoted about half a sentence to agricultural biodiversity, and even then it was a throwaway line about food coming “from nature”.

Well, that just won’t do. So Luigi and I had a quick conversation and decided to launch the First Great Agro.agro.biodiver.se Competition: make a better movie (which we will interpret very liberally — animation, Ken Burns-style stills, whatever) and focus on agricultural biodiversity. Perhaps there should be a second category for posters?

We haven’t yet decided on a prize (how about an iPod nano?) or the detailed rules or the closing date or how to enter or how the winner will be decided. But we’re announcing it now so that people have a chance to prepare their entries. Maybe it should run for a year? Help us, please, by sending us your comments on this hare-brained scheme and also making it known to anyone and everyone who might be interested.

The Rules are here. If you don’t like them, tell us why.