Wintertime = Soup

Okay, here’s another one:

50% Allium porrum, 50% wild Rumex acetolosa, Allium sativum powder, a handful of Avena sativa grains, very few salt grains.

Boil, mix (before or after throwing in Avena sativa), drink.

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Oh my…

From Nature’s Careers and jobs section this week, two points that made me depressed.

US scientists keep jobs. That’s a good thing, and of course, it doesn’t drive me down per se. I’m glad it’s working fine over there… Only about 4% of biologists are unemployed! That’s so low! It definitely seems like I’m not living at the right place. I do not have the least clue about the same French statistics, but it is probably much higher, let’s say at least three times (that would be the national average, though it is even more probably higher given the state of science job market in here)…

French recruitement. This year is nevertheless an apparent exception, at least with regard to agriculture research. Not bad at all neither (though none of the advertised profiles fit anything that I would bring for as a scientist… That’s not for me this year neither…). But have a look at the comments -a few quotes:

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French Brittany

This is why I find FB* enjoyable any time of the year. That’s grandiose, even in fall and wintertime…

Fall colours never fading...

Note that contrast and saturation were slightly increased, but not to a point where it changed much perceived landscape…

*No, that’s not Facebook.

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Dead alike

Dead like them… Thanatosis. Or pseudocide. Despite the dark side, these words are fascinating.

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New Carnival

Just foudn some kind of new carnival. Well, it’s been around for some months now (I plead guilty, I’ve never found any link to it, but I wasn’t much in here recently so I guess it’s sort of okay). Carnal Carnival. For gross posts. (Ah ah! my latest sentence had only one vowel, and this was the only reason I wrote this post… :).

Still makes me wonder how many editions can this carnival sustain, but you can find previous editions from the carnival blog here… Or is it that it’s not really my business? I guess some work should be needed to see a plant post featured in this… Because you all know plants can’t be gross. Animals do.

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Cost of global taxonomy

In an outgoing edition of Trends in Ecology & Evolution*, you may find an interesting exercise in estimating the probable cost of the (quite huge) task of describing the whole animal kingdom (the whole “current”).

The basic assumptions are based on current lifetime species descriptions by professional systematicists, their salary (as I understand, correcting by the time allowed to fulfill other academic tasks such as teaching and administrative work needed), integrating the cost of forming and recruiting young taxonomists, and weighted by the actual needs for specialists (broadly defined following three categories: vertebrates, insects and other-non-vertebrate-organisms).

Then based on a rather generous estimated of species waiting to be descripted (6.8 billions), the estimated cost of having described the whole current animal species on earth is…

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Simple soup recipe (2)

Preparation: 42 min, once again (this is the average time I need to cook the family meal).

Ingredients*: 1 Brassica oleracea var. capitata f. rubra, 4 Scorzonera hispanica, 3 Solanum tuberosum var. “Ratte”, 2 Allium cepa, 1 Beta vulgaris var. conditiva, 3 handfuls of Oriza sativa var. “Selenio”, Cinnamomum verum, white Prunus domestica jam, salt.

Peel, boil, mix, and enjoy!

 

(For meat-eaters, good with almost any fried pork cut.)

* Whenever possible, exact taxonomic level is described, though it is supposed to work with different varieties.

 

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