Pre-Columbian Mountaineering

From Wikipedia page on World Altitude Records (mountaineering):

European exploration of the Himalaya began in earnest during the mid-19th century, and the earliest people known to have climbed in the range were surveyors of the Great Trigonometric Survey. During the 1850s and 1860s they climbed dozens of peaks of over 6,100 m (20,000 ft) and several of over 6,400 m (21,000 ft) in order to make observations, and it was during this period that claims to have ascended the highest point yet reached by man began to be made.

Most of these early claims have now been rendered redundant by the discovery of the bodies of three children at the 6,739 m (22,110 ft) summit of Llullaillaco in South America: Inca sacrifices dated to around AD 1500.  There is no direct evidence that the Incas reached higher points, but the discovery of the skeleton of a guanaco on the summit ridge of Aconcagua (6,962 m, 22,841 ft) suggests that they also climbed on that mountain, and the possibility of Pre-Columbian ascents of South America's highest peak cannot be ruled out.

The Genetic Snowdrift

From a post by John Hawks:

...  Recent human evolution is not progress toward a pinnacle. The human population is a snowdrift where ten thousand trade-offs have blown together, mostly by the luck of mutations.

Crane Fly

A crane fly, probably of the species Tipula paludosa.  The blunt end to the abdomen means that this is a male.  Female crane flies have sharp-ended abdomens which are easier to push into the ground when laying eggs.

Photo taken in Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2008-09-14.

Bug

A hemipteran bug of some sort. Photo taken this morning by my daughter Zoe in Reading University grounds.

Nomograms

When I first came across nomograms in my early teens I was mystified by them.  They looked interesting but the article on stellar evolution they accompanied gave no clue on how to use them.  They looked a bit like graphs, but had three or more graduated scales, and these scales didn't have to be at right-angles to each other, indeed, they might even be curved!  It was only a few weeks later that I discovered that you were meant to lay a ruler or straight-edge across the graduated scales, and by doing so you could perform various calculations.  Nomograms are a sort of graphical generalization of a slide-rule, and like the slide-rule they became extinct following the introduction of pocket calculators.

Anyhow, these long dormant memories were triggered when I came across the following awesome series of posts by Ron Doerfler at Dead Reckonings:

• The Art of Nomography I: Geometric Design
• The Art of Nomography II: Designing with Determinants
  
• The Art of Nomography III: Transformations
  
• A Zoomorphic Nomogram
  
• A 4-Variable Nomogram (by Liunan Li and Ron Doerfler)