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About Daniel M. Bensen
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Blog post(see posts like this a week earlier by signing up to my $1 patreon)
You might remember my first radiation of conodonts last month. Now it’s time for phase two of my art/evolution experiment. With the aid of a dice, I halved the numbers of condont species, leaving only five to radiate into 11 new (and somewhat better drawn) species. These are:
pinkish – eats smaller plankton
gray – eats larger plankton
gray-blue – detritivore, conodont elements protruding throug -
Blog postSo there we were, giving this stranger 200 leva.
“What? Are you serious?” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He really wanted to check that what he thought was happening was actually happening. His face scrunched up, trying not to cry.
That was when I was finally sure this wasn’t all a scam.
It had started as a quick – and rather unpleasant – walk. The weather had turned mean: chilly and blustery, with bitter little needles of water blowing up into our faces. But Pavlina -
Blog postYa que los amigos de @zona han levantado la liebre*, os dejamos por aquí un pedazo generoso de la cubierta de nuestro próximo lanzamiento en la colección Excelsior: . pic.twitter.com/qkF3BMacr7
— Ediciones Gigamesh (@EGigamesh) May 3, 2022
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Blog postPart 1 of the inspirational story Paul Venet told to the volunteers in our program to teach English to Ukrainian Refugees in Bulgaria. Thank you to the volunteers and Fulbright Bulgaria.
If you would like to volunteer to teach English or Bulgarian to Ukrainian refugees, follow this link.
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Blog post(Barrayar is the setting of several of the books in Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, for which she has won a deservedly enormous number of Hugos, Nebulas, and other awards. Go read those books.)
Go read last week’s post (https://buff.ly/37YTeai), which introduced the Barrayaran dialects of French, Russian, English, and Greek, as well as the alphabet used to write them all.
All four of Barrayar’s indigenous dialects have diverged significantly from their Earth standard -
Blog post(this post appeared seven days earlier on my patreon)
(Barrayar is the setting of several of the books in Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, for which she has won a deservedly enormous number of Hugos, Nebulas, and other awards. Go read those books.)
And now, the in-world voice. Ahem.
Barrayar is a life-bearing exoplanet, colonized through naturally-occurring wormholes in the 23rd century. Soon after initial colonization began, however, the wormhole linking Barraya -
Blog postMejduchasie and Fulbright Bulgaria are organizing free Bulgarian and English for Ukrainian refugees.
If you would like to sign up for lessons, here is the link:
http://mejduchasie.com/for-ukrainian-refugees-en/
Separate lessons for adults and children
Lessons will be virtual – you can participate from anywhere.
Lessons will begin in early May.
If you know someone who needs these lessons, please share this message with them. If you want to teach Englis -
Blog post(see posts like this on my Patreon one week earlier)
Partly this came from a conversation we’ve been having at the Spec Evo forum, and partly from some musings I’ve been having on the random aspects of evolution. More on randomness next time. For now, I give you a delicious array of conodonts.
Conodonts were jawless fishes that lived until about 200 million years ago. They used comb-like teeth of hydroxyapatite (the major component of both teeth and bones) to filter plan -
Blog post(see posts like this a week earlier on my Patreon)
Experiments with an idea that never made it into Interchange. Imagine a fish that gets onto land, not by pushing on the ground with its fins, but by using its jaws. Remember that fish have (potentially) several sets of jaws nested one within the other, all evolved from the repeating structure of the gill arches.
In the topmost picture, the lower jaws are divided at the “chin” and folded back into comb-shaped display structures -
Blog postOver on the speculative evolution forum, Science Meets Fiction asked this cool question: “What might life look like if it had ten times as much time to develop since its world’s equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion?”
I can’t do it justice, but – what do you know – I tried anyway. Here goes:
This experiment seems to show that evolution doesn’t hit an asymptote and stop. Even in a completely unchanging environment, while there are diminishing marginal returns to optimization, th
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