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August 27, 2006

Pats (41-0 over D.C.) lack only Branch; The yellow jacket nest that swallowed a car; Update on Steorn (free energy folks)

Originally posted 00:48 a.m.; updated with Reche Caldwell stats 11:52 a.m.

Pats 41, Redskins 0: New England Patriots' Rosevelt Colvin, left, sacks Washington Redskins quarterback Mark Brunell in the second quarter of last night's game.

They looked that good.

Reche Caldwell seems to catch passes from Matt Cassel more easily than from Tom Brady, who clearly longs for Deion Branch to return, especially after those incompletes:

Data source: ESPN Play-by-play

Branch may yet be the last guy, the final piece of the well-oiled machine. Hope so.

Meanwhile, the Redskins' hometown press is cold: A Pointless Exhibition. Even more depressing for Redskins fans: Brunell, Offense: Three and Out / First Unit Has Yet to Score in Preseason

Big house: There's been a buzz about giant yellow-jacket nests in Alabama and Georgia, but in the Web-size photos that accompany news stories, it's been hard to see much detail.

The Montgomery Advertiser ran an AP story (Giant nests perplex experts) that included the photo of the nest that swallowed a car in Tallassee, Ala., above. Playing around with the url of the photo, I discovered that it ended with "MaxW=300"

I wondered if it were actually larger, just set to display no wider than 300 pixels, and I played with that number. Here it is, the original 800-pixel-wide photo of a yellow-jacket nest in Harry Coker's 1955 Chevy. If you use a Firefox extension such as Image Zoom , or download the image to a photo viewer, you can see it even larger. Much of it is in perfect focus. Spooky, like hard cobwebs.

You can see a bit more of the car's exterior, and read more about giant nests, at this July 10 Alabama Cooperative Extension blog item (What is Causing Super-sized Yellow Jacket Nests?) :

“It’s speculated --- and, again, this is only speculation --- that the very mild winter has allowed these nest to survive,” he (Dr. Charles Ray, an Extension entomologist and research fellow with Auburn University’s Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology) says. “Rather than starting spring with a single queen --- as yellow jackets traditionally do --- these nests are starting with possibly a couple of thousand workers and possibly multiple queens.”

Even so, Ray concedes that this is little more than an educated guess.

“We’re not really sure how this multiple queen thing works. It could be that the daughters of the original queen don’t leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate.”

That would be an evolutionary leap.

Update from the Guardian (U.K.) on Steorn, the free-energy promoters (blogged here earlier): These men think they're about to change the world

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:52 AM | Permalink