Friday, January 21, 2011

January Riding


Frozen mud in shaded sections, slop ball muck in the bright sunshine. Brake pad and chain maintenance after every ride. Clifbars hard to eat, too cold. Water from bottle, instant ice cream headache. Too many clothes, not enough clothes. Soaked by rain, wetsuit mentality. Glasses too dark, glasses to light, fogging up while climbing. Don't miss it, 'cause it won't last!

Friday, January 14, 2011

Who are the "Real Webfoots?"


The nickname for Oregon's first sports teams was "Webfoots," coined by longtime Oregonian sports editor L. H. Gregory. The name originated from a group of fishermen from the coast of Massachusetts whose descendants settled in Oregon's Willamette Valley. When the University of Oregon was founded in 1876, Webfoots was the natural choice for the school's nickname, because of Oregon's reputation for wet weather.

Friday, January 7, 2011

The Emerging Fate Of The Neandertals



"When you look at all of the well dated and diagnostic early modern European fossils, there is a persistent presence of anatomical features that were present among the Neandertals but absent from the earlier African modern humans," Trinkaus said. "Early modern Europeans reflect both their predominant African early modern human ancestry and a substantial degree of admixture between those early modern humans and the indigenous Neandertals."

This analysis, along with a number of considerations of human genetics, argues that the fate of the Neandertals was to be absorbed into modern human groups. Just as importantly, it also says that the behavioral difference between the groups were small. They saw each other as social equals.