When I got to work Monday I found that someone had broken into our portables and stolen our laptops. All of the work I have done for this year including the countless weekend hours is gone. I had not backed anything up yet. It was full of things I just can't recreate easily. The damn thing was over ten years old and not worth anything but I really needed the contents.

Lilith,

Sorry to learn of this! Best of lock on recovering all you can. :console:

Bastards.

:gb:

Yep.

Cliff Roberson has left the building.

Lilith, sorry to hear about the theft. Hopefully the people responsible will be caught and punished and that by some wild accident, the materials you need will still be there.

Well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. Still ...

This is a bigger minefield than the DMZ.

At what point do you draw the line in eugenic euthanasia? 10yo, 20yo, red-head, over 50?

It gives me the shivers.

It is astonishing to read what academics can dream up, isn’t it?

At times it's tempting to abort my 12 year old "fetus". Could I also abort someone else's 51 year old one?

Some people would kill for the right of post-partum abortion.

Some of the people who are reporting Science stories, yet lack the science knowledge to understand the story.

A current story goes thusly:-

Baby coral can clone, researchers say
By Natalie Poyhonen
Updated March 02, 2012 09:35:31

During the experiments, about half of the fertilised coral eggs broke into smaller fragments.

Marine scientists in north Queensland have discovered baby coral on the Great Barrier Reef can clone itself before developing into adult coral.

The team from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville set out to research what happens to fragile coral embryos when they fragment during different wave conditions.

Unlike most animal embryos, the coral does not have a protective outer layer.

Dr Andrew Negri says during the experiments, which mimicked wave heights during coral spawning, about half of the fertilised coral eggs broke into smaller fragments.

"If there are choppy conditions in the ocean, this would be enough to break the coral embryos apart and create smaller coral clones," he said.

Dr Negri says it is just one of the strategies used to reproduce and could help its long-term survival.

"By having such fragile embryos maybe this increases the number of larvae that are available to settle," he said.

"But it could be that producing a different size range or wider size range of different embryos and larvae may help them as well - may help them to get into smaller nooks and crannies and settle and attach and avoid predators."

Hereby endeth the story.

What has not been understood by the reporter is that corals, like their cousins the jellyfish and the hydras are not animals, but colonies of closely related beasties. If the fragment contains enough of all the types of beasties, it can grow into a complete polyp.

Lord save us from hemi-comprehension.

Sad that I didn't catch up with TinglingTess before I leave for the weekend. Everyone please give her birthday hugs from me!!!!

I'm going to borrow this thread and slightly change it to "what pissed me off within the past 48 hour".

I had to bust my ass at work for some big wigs that are coming through this week, so they made us work 5 days at 8 hours instead of 4 days at 10 hours so I lost a day off.

I got a rejection letter from a possible job that would have paid me a hell of a lot more money after waiting almost a month for some word from them. (The letter was written on the 29th and delivered on the 2nd).

I've felt like shit for two days straight and it's from a combination of allergies and possibly a cold.

Because my cousin is moving out there is a huge mess in the downstairs and he's been up very late for a few days in a row making it hard for me to sleep.

And this morning my ranchero decided she no longer wanted to start.