Speaking of pedantry, you and Jennifer may both appreciate following that Benweb blog I found yesterday. His subject today is pickerelweed and I really have to admire his determination and apparent attention to detail, including the commentary on taxonomy.

Now that’s bloody metazoan AND eukaryotic chauvinism! >.<

Without setting aside anything, essentially all organisms are prokaryotes. Those minutely few who aren't, are protists.

First day of ecology (mandatory class), prof goes: "We're gonna look mostly at animals because plants don't have much in the way of behaviour." *twitch* I had a chat with the guy after class, which probably didn't do much good for my diplomatic relations with the Zoology dep't…

Then again, I consider amoebae to be intelligent and clearly in possession of behaviour… =D
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To a rough approximation and setting aside vertebrate chauvinism, it can be said that essentially all organisms are insects.

The context where I encountered the phrase first was an anecdote in Carl’s Zimmer’s Parasite Rex about a journal of animal behavior that initially rejected a paper on a parasite’s behavior. On resubmission and acceptance the author was told by the editor to excuse his vertebrate chauvinism because he didn’t realize that parasites could behave.

I just got a microscope so I’ll go play with it instead of spamming your blog with more of my comments. Just tell me if I get too out of hand.

I’m not a Wired reader, and unfortunately on top of that I must admit that I have an (ironically) rather strong anti-primate bias. One of my more favorite human-music-animal moments was in the amazing documentary “Berserk in the Antarctic”, when the crazy Norwegian sailing the ship decided to play AC/DC’s “Back in Black” for a pod of whales. The whales really seemed to dig it.

The bird mating was hilarious. I felt sorry for the guy, though. I can’t conceive why he didn’t throw that damn bird off of him, though, rare or not.

The melodies … use deliberate, but mild, dissonances against the harmony, producing a piquant, melancholy effect that matches the performance instructions, which are to play each piece “slowly”, “dolorously” or “gravely”.

Arabesque music doesn’t have a very interesting Wiki page- all I got is that it is done in 2/2 or 4/4 meter.

Did you catch the piece on music for monkeys at WIRED last month? I followed the links to find the music for cats and played it for mine. It definitely gets her attention.

I grew up on the same set of TV shows and remember life before cable. I don’t know what a kid would do today if you said there were only 4 choices on TV.

Finally, speaking of BBC documentaries, you did you see this rare bird attempting to mate?