I learned about this story in an email from a mail list.

I have for a long time been fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between some species of acacias and ants. Honestly, I have also for a long time been fascinated by ants alone. Now some researchers have observed interesting behavior by a species of jumping spider, Bagheera kiplingi, that lives on the same acacia plants.

I wrote a while ago about my old workstation being taken down. My (old) website was not the only one being hosted there; Shun Wang also had his site there. He has relocated, though, and his new site is at http://www.shun-wang.net/.

I was confronted this weekend by a friend -— let’s call him “Kiran” -— who was faux-irritated that I never told him about this blog. Sorry about that, and I am also sorry to anyone else who has landed here and felt similarly. This whole thing started as an experiment, and I believe I only told two people about the blog (one being my mom).

One or two people have probably noticed that I have not posted for a while. September gone. October gone. Most of November gone. Well, a lot has been going on, but I am not going to go into details now.

Version 0.2.1 of the Geneagrapher is now available for installation. This release does not add new features to the software, but it does fix a debilitating issue that caused multiple advisors to be ignored (this problem was introduced following changes to the Mathematics Genealogy Project pages). Two users brought this to my attention, and I am grateful for their help (although I initially thought the problem was isolated to the recently-deleted, original web-based version of the Geneagrapher).

Back in late January I reported that my workstation at UIUC was going to be taken down. It took a while because another website on the machine needed to be moved first, but that is apparently done because Proteus is now down.

Manufacturing methamphetamine used to take a whole home chemistry lab, but now it only requires a two-liter soda bottle, some cold pills, and household chemicals.

The American Heart Association has reminded us again that Americans consume a lot of added sugar each day. Between 2001 and 2004, Americans consumed, on average, twenty-two teaspoons of added sugar daily. The recommended limits? For men: nine teaspoons, and women: six teaspoons.

At the end of this link is a great picture of a squirrel that jumped in the frame during a time-delayed photograph. Be sure to read the caption beneath the picture.